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The lower level of my grandparents’ barn is a dusty, dirty place. It’s been about thirty years, a little more, since the building has been used for its intended purposes of storing farm equipment and housing animals and their feed.
When Grampa died, people started putting junk in the barn, stuff that one family member or another, on one occasion or another, must have deemed too good or too inconvenient to throw away. For some items I suppose we decided, “We might find a use for this some day.” There is little order to what you’d see there; you might find, say, a pile of aluminum items neatly stacked in a heap, awaiting a journey to a recycling center, but mostly things just seem to have been tossed in any available spot at any given moment.
One summer afternoon a few years ago, I found a typewriter in the barn. I don’t remember finding it, and I don’t know anything about whose it was or who abandoned it, but I happened to discover, this past week, that I actually took fourteen photographs of that typewriter, none of them so evidently wonderful that I ever thought to show them to you until today. I never even took a close enough look at the pictures until now, to notice that someone’s rank-and-name is embossed on the typewriter’s case, beside the handle. Lieut Someone. Maybe B-U-R-K-Something. I’ll go back sometime and see if I can find it again and fold back the handle to read the name. I’ll ask my cousin Terry if he knows about it, the typewriter or the lieutenant.
And if I get real ambitious, listen to this idea, I might check to see if the typewriter ribbon is still intact. Maybe I can unspool it and figure out, letter by letter, the last words someone ever typed on that machine.
Yes, yes. If I ever get real ambitious, you can count on me, I will let you know.
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