by Tom Hanks
“Ready?” Mr. Garcia shouted. Kenny nodded. His mother flashed another thumbs-up. She reached forward and rubbed her son’s head. If she said something, Kenny did not hear her, but he could see her large grin.
As the plane sped up and the noise got louder, a feeling came over Kenny that he had never, ever had before. They were moving faster and faster and then lifting up, making his stomach go down but the top of his head feel like it was rising. The ground quickly got smaller; soon the streets and houses and cars no longer looked real. Kenny turned to look out the side window. The wing of the plane blocked his view, so he leaned forward to see the earth and sky in front of the plane.
He saw the buildings downtown and recognized what had once been his world: the Tower Theatre and the grid of the streets, the Old Fort—Sutter’s Mill, it was called, where gold was discovered in pioneer days—and there was the Leamington Hotel. He could read the sign.
Kenny’s first flight in an airplane was the most amazing event of his life. His head seemed to fill up with air and his breath went short. The sun was brighter than it had ever been before, and Kenny was glad he had dark glasses. When Mr. Garcia turned the plane by dipping the wings to the left, the vast delta area of the river took up the view. There were islands down there, separated by twisted waterways and dikes. Right next to the town where Kenny was born lived farmers who needed a boat to get to town. Kenny had no idea!
“That’s what the Mekong looks like!” Mr. Garcia shouted. He was pointing out the window. Kenny nodded out of habit, not sure if he was expected to say something. “That’s the bargain you make with Uncle Sam! He teaches you to fly then sends you bird-dogging in Vietnam!”
Kenny knew about Vietnam because the war was on Channel 12 from Chico. What a Mekong was, he had no idea.
They flew southwest, ascending so high in the sky the cars and trucks on the highways looked like they were barely moving. The waters of the river grew wide and changed hue when they met the salt water of San Francisco Bay. Ships were down in the wide river, big ships that now looked like the toy models Kenny played with on the coffee table. When Mr. Garcia dipped the wings again, Kenny’s tummy went floppy, but just for a moment.
Now they were flying north. Mr. Garcia slid half of his headset off one of his ears. “I need you to fly for a few minutes, Kenny,” he said loudly.
“I don’t know how to fly a plane!” Kenny looked at Mr. Garcia as if he were a crazy person.
“Can you imagine driving a car?”
“Yes.”
“Take hold of the yoke,” Mr. Garcia said. The yoke was half steering wheel, half handlebars. Kenny had to sit up straight to reach the handles. “The plane will go where you point it. Pull back some and get the feel of the stick.”
Kenny used more muscle than he thought he had and, sure enough, the yoke came back toward him. As it did, the sky filled the front window and the engine slowed.
“See?” Mr. Garcia said. “Now level off just as easy.”
The grown man had his hand on his flight controls, but let Kenny do the work of pushing the nose of the plane back down. The earth below took up some of the window again.
“Can I turn?” Kenny yelled.
“You’re the pilot,” Mr. Garcia said.
Very, very carefully, Kenny turned the handlebar-yoke to the right, and the plane tipped ever so slightly. Kenny could feel the change in direction. He reversed his piloting motion and felt the plane ease back.
“If you were a little taller,” Mr. Garcia said, “I’d let you work the rudder, but you can’t reach the pedals. Maybe in a year. Next year.”
Kenny imagined himself, at age eleven, flying the Comanche all by himself with his mom in the backseat.
“What I need you to do now is, see Mount Shasta up ahead?” Shasta, the massive volcano that loomed over the valley up north, was forever covered with snow. On clear days in Iron Bend the mountain looked like an enormous painting off in the distance. From Kenny’s seat in the front of the airplane, Shasta was a triangle of white, poking up over the horizon. “Fly directly at it, okay?”
“Okay!” Kenny set his eyes on the mountain and tried to keep the nose of the plane smack on target while Mr. Garcia pulled some papers out of the side of his seat and a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He wrote some things down, then studied a map. Kenny wasn’t sure how much time went by as he flew the plane straight and true, it could have been a few minutes or most of the flight home, but he never let the plane stray. More of Mount Shasta was visible by the time Mr. Garcia folded up the map and clicked his pen closed.
“Atta boy, Kenny,” he said as he took over the yoke. “You have the makings of a pilot.”
“Good job, honey!” his mom called from the back of the plane. When Kenny looked over his shoulder, her smile was nearly as big as the one on his face.
Looking out the window, Kenny saw the lanes of the highway that led straight up the valley through towns like Willows and Orland leading to Iron Bend and beyond. Just two days ago he and his mom had been down below on that highway. Now, he was miles above it.
After Kenny had flown the plane he had to pop his ears, yawning widely and blowing his nose with his mouth closed. It didn’t hurt. The plane was descending, the engine sounding louder as the ground grew closer and the landmarks of Iron Bend showed themselves. There was the logging yard south of town, then the two motels off the highway, the old grain silos that held no grain, and the parking lot of the Shopping Plaza with the Montgomery Ward. Kenny had never been told there was an airport in Iron Bend, but there it was, beyond the Union High football field.
The plane jiggled and shook as Mr. Garcia came in for the landing. He did something to the engine that made it go soft and nearly silent just before the wheels squeeched on the concrete runway. He drove the airplane like a car and came to a stop a few feet from where other planes were parked. When he shut the engine off, the propeller kept going around a few times until seizing up with a jerk. Without the engine, the quiet was odd, making the unclicking of the seat belts sound crisply clear, like something from a movie at the State Theater.
“Cheated death again,” Mr. Garcia said without having to shout.
“Honestly,” said Kenny’s mom. “Do you have to put it that way?”
Mr. Garcia laughed, leaned back, and kissed her on the cheek.
—
The airport had a very small coffee shop. There were no customers and, it appeared, no staff. Kenny, still wearing his dark pilot glasses, sat at a table, the pink suitcase on the floor at his feet while his mom put coins into a pay phone on the wall. She dialed, waited, then hung up and put the same coins back into the phone. She dialed another number before she was able to talk to anyone.
“Well, the line was busy,” she said into the phone. “Can you come get him? Because we have to get back. How long? All right.” She hung up and came over to the bench. “Your dad is coming from work to pick you up. Let’s see if there’s some hot cocoa for you and coffee for me.”
Kenny could see through the glass coffee shop door into the office of the airport. Mr. Garcia—still wearing his dark glasses, too—was talking to a man who was sitting at a desk. Kenny heard a loud whirring noise that turned out to be a machine that made hot chocolate. When his mom brought it to him in a Styrofoam cup, one sip told Kenny the cocoa was too watery. He didn’t finish it.
His dad came, driving the station wagon. He left the motor running as he got out of the car, wearing his cook’s pants and heavy shoes. He shook hands with Mr. Garcia, said a few words to Kenny’s mom, then picked up the small pink suitcase and carried it out to the car.
Kenny sat in the front seat, just like he did in the airplane. As they drove out of the parking lot, his father asked him about his dark glasses.
“Mr. Garcia gave them to me,” Kenny said.
Kenny told his father about aiming for Mount Shasta, then about going to the zoo and the peewee golf and seeing the old house.
“Ah,” his father said. He
said it again when Kenny told him the Callendars had moved away.
As they rode into town and back to the Blue Gum Restaurant, Kenny looked out the window, his eyes tinted a deep blue by his metal-framed sunglasses, scanning the sky. Mr. Garcia had probably taken off by now, and Kenny hoped to see the plane up there. His mom would be sitting in the copilot’s seat.
But there was no sign of them. None at all.
These Are the Meditations of My Heart
She was not looking to buy an old typewriter. She needed nothing and wanted no more possessions—new, used, antique—not a thing. She had vowed to weather her recent personal setbacks with an era of Spartan living; a new minimalism, a life she could fit in her car.
She liked her small apartment west of the Cuyahoga River. She’d tossed away all the clothes she’d worn with him, the Knothead; she cooked for herself almost every night and listened to a lot of podcasts. She had enough money saved to see her to the New Year, allowing a lazy, agenda-free summer. January would freeze the lake and probably burst the pipes of her building, but by then she would be gone. New York or Atlanta or Austin or New Orleans. She had options galore as long as she traveled light. But the Lakewood Methodist Church on the corner of Michigan and Sycamore was having a Saturday Parking Lot Sale, raising money for community service programs like Free Day Care, twelve-step program meetings, and, she didn’t know, maybe Meals on Wheels. She was neither a churchgoer nor a baptized Methodist, but she was fairly certain that sauntering through a parking lot full of card tables brimming with yard sale debris was not an act of worship.
As a hoot she almost bought a set of aluminum TV dinner trays, but three of them showed signs of rust. Boxes of costume jewelry revealed no treasures. But then she saw a set of Tupperware ice pop makers. As a kid, she had been in charge of pouring Kool-Aid or orange juice into the molds and inserting the patented plastic handles, which, when the freezer had done the physics, made for inexpensive icy treats. She could almost feel the hot wind of summer in the foothills, her hands sticky from melting, fruity ice. With no haggling, she got the set for a dollar.
On the same table was the typewriter, the color of faded Pop Art red—not an attraction. What got her eye was the adhesive label glued to the top left corner of its housing. In lowercase letters and underlined (by using the Shift and 6 key) the original owner had typed
The words had been typed as many as thirty years ago, when the machine was brand new, just out of the box, perhaps a gift on a girl’s thirteenth birthday. A more recent owner had typed BUY ME FOR $5 on a piece of paper and rolled it into the carriage.
The machine was a portable; the body was plastic. The ribbon was two-tone, black over red, and there was a hole in the lid where the name Smith Corona or Brother or Olivetti had once been plugged. There was also a reddish leatherette carrying case with a half-sleeve opening and push-button latch. She punched three of the keys—A, F, P—and they all clacked onto the paper and settled back again. So, the thing worked, sort of.
“Is this typewriter really only five dollars?” she asked of a Lady Methodist at a nearby card table.
“That?” the woman said. “I think it works but nobody uses typewriters anymore.”
That was not the question she had asked, but she didn’t care. “I’ll take it.”
“Show me the money.”
And just like that the Methodists were five bucks richer.
—
At her apartment, she prepped a supply of pineapple juice ice pops for later that night. She’d have a couple when the day cooled, when she could have her windows open and watch for the first fireflies of the evening. She pulled the typewriter from its cheap case, set it out on her tiny kitchen table, and rolled in a piece of printer paper from the feed of her LaserWriter. She tried each of the keys—many stuck. One of the four rubber feet on the bottom of the body was missing, so the machine rocked a bit. She pounded each of the keys from the top row straight across, shifting to caps as well, trying, with some degree of success, to shake loose the stickiness. Though the ribbon was old, the letters were legible. She tried the spacing of the carriage return—single and double—which worked, although the bell did not. The margin sliders scraped and then jammed in place.
The typewriter needed a firm scrubbing and a lube job, which she expected to run, say, twenty-five dollars. But she pondered the greater conundrum, one that faces all who buy a typewriter in the third millennium: what is its purpose? Addressing envelopes. Her mom would enjoy typewritten letters from her wandering daughter. She could send poison-pen messages to her ex, like, “Hey, Knothead, you made a big fucking mistake!” with no fear of an email record. She could type out some remark, take a digital photo of it with her phone, then post that onto her blog and Facebook page. She could make to-do lists for the refrigerator door. That made for five Hipster-Retro reasons for her to own a new-old typewriter. Chuck in a few heartfelt meditations and she had six valid uses.
She typed the original owner’s intent for the machine.
The space bar skipped, which would not do. She grabbed her phone and googled old typewriter repair.
Three listings gave her the choices of a shop two hours away near Ashtabula, a place downtown that did not answer its phone, or, crazily enough, Detroit Avenue Business Machines, which was just a few minutes’ walk away. She knew the shop—it was next to a tire store. She had strolled past it many times on her way to a great pizzeria and, a few doors down, to the art supply store that was soon to go out of business. She thought the small shop was for computers and printer repair so, after taking the few-minutes’ walk, was amused to see, upon closer inspection of its front window, an old adding machine, a thirty-year-old telephone answering machine, something called a Dictaphone, and an ancient typewriter. The bell over the door tinkled when she entered.
One side of the shop was nothing but printers—boxes of them along with toner cartridges for any model. The other side of the shop was like a Museum for Yesteryear’s Tools of Commerce. There were adding machines with eighty-one keys and pull handles, single-use ten-key calculators, a stenographer’s machine, IBM Selectric typewriters, most in beige housings, and, on wall-mounted shelves, dozens of assorted typewriters gleaming black, red, green, even baby blue. They all appeared to be in perfect working order.
The service counter was in the rear of the shop. Behind it were desks and a workbench, where an old fellow was going over papers.
“How can I help the young lady?” he asked with a slight accent, most likely Polish.
“I’m hoping you can save my investment,” she said. She laid the leatherette case on the counter. She unclasped the case and produced the typewriter. The old man let out a sigh at the sight of it.
“I know,” she said. “This gem needs work. Half the keys are gummed up. It rocks when I type, and the space bar is kablooey. And no bell.”
“No bell,” he said. “Ah.”
“Can you help a girl out? I have five bucks sunk into this thing.”
The old man looked at her, then back at the machine. He let out another sigh. “Young lady, there is nothing I can do for you.”
She was confused. From what her eyes took in, this was the place to get a typewriter back into working order. On the workbench behind the old man she could see disassembled machines and parts of typewriters, for crying out loud. “Because none of those parts back there match my typewriter?”
“There are no parts for this,” he said, waving his hand over the dull red typewriter and leatherette case.
“You’d have to order some? I can wait.”
“You don’t understand.” On the edge of the counter was a little case for his official business cards. He took one and handed it to her. “What do you read on this, young lady?”
She read the card. “DETROIT AVENUE BUSINESS MACHINES. Printers. Sales. Service. Repair. Closed Sunday, which is tomorrow,” she said. “Office Hours nine a.m. to four p.m. Saturdays, ten a.m. to three p.m. My watch and your clock both show twelve ninet
een.” She turned the card over. Nothing on the back. “What am I getting wrong?”
“The name of this shop,” the old man said. “Read the name of my shop.”
“Detroit Avenue Business Machines.”
“Yes,” he said. “Business Machines.”
“Okay,” she said. “Yeah.”
“Young lady, I work on machines. But this?” Again, a wave of his hand over her five-dollar typewriter. “This is toy.” He said the word like he was cussing: turd.
“Manufactured of plastic to look like a typewriter. But this is not a typewriter.”
He detached the lid on the top of what he called a toy, the plastic bending until it came off with a snap to reveal the workings inside. “The typebars, the levers, the ribbon spools—plastic. The ribbon reverse. The vibrator.”
She had no idea there was a vibrator in a manual typewriter.
He banged on some of the keys, flipped levers, slid the carriage back and forth, spun the platen, hit the backspace key, all in disgust. “A typewriter is a tool. In the right hands, one that can change the world. This? This is meant to take up space and make noise.”
“Can you at least give it a little oil so I can take a whack at changing the world?” she asked.
“I could clean it, oil it, tighten every screw. Make the bell ring. Charge you sixty dollars and sprinkle fairy dust upon this typewriter. But I would be taking advantage of you. In a year, the space bar would still be…”
