I just spoke to my friend, Adam. I’ve known him since we were in middle school. We were in church youth group together. In high school we sat across from each other in keyboarding class. Mrs. Conway, our teacher, was as old school as they come! Each student had their own word processor, with a manila envelope taped to the top of the key board, preventing us from looking at the keys, forcing us to memorize the strokes necessary to type whatever combination of keys she recited. Mrs. Conway would walk around the classroom with a wooden pointer in her hand, tapping the pointer in her palm: “Semi, semi, semi, space. Return. Semi, semi, semi, space. Return.”
I HATED keyboarding! My parents FORCED me to take it. Adam made it bearable. I didn’t know him well in the Fall when the class began. I knew WHO he was, a year older than me, quiet, smart, we saw each other at church occasionally. At first I hated Adam. Keyboarding came easily to him, everything involving technology comes easily to Adam! I’d complain about how difficult it was to type and how much I hated the wrote exercises that Mrs. Conway assigned. Adam is steady, a man of few words, he’d say: “I think it’s pretty easy.” I’d roll my eyes and try not to cry.
Without a shadow of a doubt, I have used the skills that I learned from Mrs. Conway nearly every day of my adult life. I amaze my children by typing while looking at them, talking to them, listening to them. I am not a lightening fast typest but I can hold my own. I just took a job as an administrative assistant without ANY experience AS an administrative assistant and I’m pleasantly surprised how well I can hold my own, typing pages and pages of notes at a time; meeting minutes, and emails.
Adam got me through keyboarding. Once I mellowed just a little and got over my anxiety and self-hate, I was able to memorize the home keys well enough to venture out and confidently type a “t”, for example, without looking. Adam was there, typing away, effortlessly, ready with a goofy smile whenever I got stressed. I just got off the phone with Adam, I haven’t talked to him in almost a year, before that it was many years. I reminded him of how “cutting edge” he was when he and our mutual friend, Josh, Adam’s roommate at the time, began blogging from the perspective of their cats back in 2000. I remember asking them: “Why is it called ‘Blogging’?” and being so impressed when they explained “It’s short for weblog”.
Here I am, I’ve been isolated with Covid for over a week. For various reasons, I gave up social media quite a while ago. Sooooo much good has come from the space in my life and my brain that Facebook and Instagram took up. But I’m lonely and I love to write. So here goes! Please let me know what you think! . . . . just as soon as I figure out how to enable comments!!
Collecting Pieces of Me 