Ink-Stained Wretch

Why do all my shirts have dark blue or black blotter-like stains on the cuffs below the elbow? Why do two of my favorite pairs of pants have small but impossible-to-ignore and hard-to-remove Rorschach tests on the seat? Should I start wearing plastic sleeve coverings like the bookkeeper or telegraph clerk in the old movies? Its an occupational hazard.

I've been scribbling since I can remember. Some of my early work was drawing on scrap paper my dad would bring home from the office; the writing of actual words and sentences probably came later, but the medium is the message, and the visual line, not the play, is the thing. Paper, pencil, pen, eye, hand, analog marks on a two-dimensional surface.

Early on, uniforms of sports teams and military units - real or imaginary - were a favorite subject. The typography of team names, logos, and players' numbers was fun too. Serif or sans serif, block or rounded, printed or cursive. Later came lists and maps of realigned baseball or football leagues with divisions reflecting geographical balance, maps of dreamed-up cities with street grids and government buildings, floor plans of unlikely houses. I spent a lot of time in my room and went through a lot of paper in the 1950s before anyone thought about saving trees.

The technology of the game changed in junior high school when I developed a personal relationship with the typewriter. I still wrote longhand of course; make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. Mr. Fiocchi had a roomful of manual Royals in typing class, and I had access to a little blue Olivetti portable at home. Neural pathways connecting with the keyboard, smudges on the fingers from changing the ribbon, followed by crisp impressions on the paper. The round eraser with a little brush attached.

In high school we had a couple of IBM Selectrics in the journalism room, with the detachable golf-ball you could change to get a different typeface (we didn't call it a 'font') and a half-backspace key to justify lines. That was when I started to compose at the keyboard instead of doing a draft with a pen and then transcribing. But then, as now, it's all about revising, deleting, inserting, and transposing in a quest for the perfect lead, active verbs, and an editable inverted pyramid.

It's not always easy finding gainful employment when words on a page are your bricks and mortar, so I have found it expedient at times to do something else for a living. Then I would come home with dirt or dough under my fingernails instead of ink on my fingers. At times I had a hard time staying with a job in publishing, like the summer internship that convinced me I really didn't want to work at a newspaper, but that's another story.

Then there was the time I wanted to set type in the composing room instead of writing articles as a beat reporter, only to quit the night shift for a nine-to-five gig at the phone company doing business letters on an early A.B. Dick word-processing machine, circa 1978. Once you typed it in, the plastic magnetic cards stored the data electronically and printed out on command, very cutting edge.

When I decided to go back to college and get a degree in education, NOT journalism, the employment agency put me behind an IBM Selectric where I knocked out engineering syllabi, vitae, tests, and grant applications. When I changed schools and applied for financial aid, the administrators took one look at my record and put me to work on the faculty-staff newspaper. I thought I was in heaven, with my own office in the old stone theology building next to Asia House and facing Tappan Square, but as usual I didn't take full advantage of the opportunity. Was it the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time? I don't know, but I chose to go elsewhere and do other things.

Doing other things, of course, led me back behind a typewriter. I couldn't get away. After brief forays teaching kids, planting trees, selling trees, and landscaping trees - my karma after all that paper - I entered the digital age at a keyboard attached to a Mac, then a PC, then a Mac again.

It's only right to ponder, every once in a while, the possibility of another line of work, especially now that print is on its way out as the dominant publishing form. Yet half the people I know are connected in some way to printed pages and their digital offspring. In the meantime, anybody know a good stain remover? Out damn spot!