Letters to My Mother and Father
After Typewriters, Jeff Rovner Artist
I am snipping the Sunday crossword from The Idaho Statesman to go along with a letter sent home. It’s just to my mother now, but back in 1973, puzzles went along with the letters to both of them.
At first, I wrote longhand and not very often. At UCLA, even though I borrowed a typewriter to write the never-ending repertoire of papers for different courses--The Domestication of the Cat, Irony in Porter’s Ship of Fools, Poison Imagery in Hamlet, I still wrote very short letters home.
Then in graduate school, married, with a newly purchased Hermes portable typewriter, I completed papers on Renaissance literature, and I typed longer letters. Still in graduate school on a Ph.D. program, I typed my way through papers on Oscar Wilde and John Hawkes. Shifting keys and locking them in time and place, I created papers on values and creativity on my way to finishing my degree. I wrote letters telling my parents about my research, about our prolific gardens attached to married student housing at the UW-Madison, about the car battery freezing when it hit -30.
The “a” key started to stick about l983, and I was propelled into word processing on an IBM computer. My sporadic letters became weekly, single spaced sheets that I’d send with the puzzle. I could hear my mother’s voice as she sat, working a puzzle at her kitchen table with the white tablecloth, as if I were right next to her.
“You were the English major, so who is the main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, or what is the French word for “lake?” Sometimes I filled in spaces with a few words in ink before I sent them.
Although my teaching schedule was never the same, I wrote at six in the morning or on the weekend. Somehow that personal writing cleared my head for creative writing. The letters became a way of enticing myself into writing manuscripts that later could become poems, stories, or novels.
My father died in l99l. I continued letters to my mother about family, my job, and events in my life. In a short story that I was working on, I wrote that nothing was happening to my characters. They were just standing there, oblivious to my ideas. I was so angry at those characters that I wrote to my mother to tell her that I had placed them all on a raft out in the middle of a lake, and the raft was sinking.
“What a terrible thing to do,” my mother said in a phone conversation back to me. She called this time, did not write, and became part of the next generation without knowing it.
I think now that my letters were limited monologues, with time for me to sort out my life as my letters flew to California. When my computer had user friendly graphics, I placed small images on the pages -- a rose (my father’s favorite flower) and a woman golfer (for my mother who played into her eighties).
On the computer, I learned to copy and paste images in sequence. Now across a page, a row of horses galloped, cheetahs ran with the same exact stride, or wolves howled in the same sitting position. Then once, a frantic cyclist, obviously me, a mountain biker here in the west, racing toward some imaginary finish line, writing more, publishing more.
And so, along with the letters and the crossword puzzles, I finally sent my mother a short story. Presto, ready to go. Like magic, really. I pressed the print button. The one-page letter, the crossword puzzle, and the added short story. Sent off. No longer sinking on a raft, my characters were flying home.
