Another two-event day, or in this case a two-event night. The Community Center on Thursday evening hosted both the P.R. Community Association monthly meeting and the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts’ branch of The Regional Assembly of Text Letter Writing Club (whose main headquarters is in Vancouver). Unfortunately, both were scheduled for 7 p.m. Seeing as how I am the note taker at the Community Association, I concluded that duty required me to go there, rather than across the hall to the Letter Writing Club.
The Community Association continues to explore or maybe just to try to understand its potential role on the Point. The other main all-inclusive groups on the Point are the long-time Taxpayers’ Association and the Voters’ Association, both of which wax and wane over time. The former, of course, includes Canadians and Americans who own property here, and the latter includes U.S. citizens here who can vote in the U.S. Both these groups have, historically, been organized around political action, either with respect to actual elections or to dealing with government entities (federal, state, and, county). The Community Association, an organization less than a year old, is understood to be open to anyone who lives here for at least some part of the year and focuses on smaller scale projects to improve the community life, particularly projects that do not require involvement in any significant way with government agencies/entities.
Thus, its first task has been to rebuild the local Community Events sign, but it has taken much longer than anyone expected and has led to some discouragement. Nevertheless, the group perseveres, and I with it, hoping that its next task (putting out a questionnaire to residents about what kinds of projects would most interest them) will move a little faster and will provide it with a better sense of what people want or care about here in Point Roberts. But I continue to be puzzled about the actual process: how does a group without a clear sense of purpose move forward? I worked for years creating ethics committees in hospitals, and that was hard enough to do, given the severe institutional hierarchies involved. But at least I understood where those groups were trying to go. Not so true with this one, but then it is not my job to make it happen, either.
By the time I got to the Writing Club meeting, everyone in that group was packing up and going home. What the ten or so people who had been there had done was to write letters on old-time hand-operated typewriters. They had a bunch of them there, ranging from ones like the old-time Underwood upright that I learned to type on in 1951, to smaller, ‘modern’ portable typewriters like the one I had in college in 1954. Although I actually made a small living in graduate school by typing Ph.D. dissertations, which means that I was pretty fast and very accurate, I am sorry to say that 25 years of computer use has rendered me actually too fast for a manual typewriter (the keys kept getting caught together as they rose to imprint the paper). Furthermore, I am also absolutely too weak in the little finger (both left and right hands) to get the a, q, z, and p keys to make even a faint imprint.
The first practical typewriter wasn’t invented until 1872. I remember years ago thinking about how George Eliot and Charles Dickens wrote their very, very long manuscripts by hand, with not quill pens, but stick pens. And then when they went back to edit their manuscripts, they got to write them by hand a second time. A book could take a very long time to write that way. It does make me wonder why they didn’t think about the possibility of shorter novels. Well, they missed the typewriter age. But now, although I actually did write a book on a typewriter in the early 80’s, I can barely remember how it would have worked to have to retype it every time I did an edit. Writing now is an easy four or five edit job, but all done within the text of the first draft.
The Writing Club is not encouraging the use of manual typewriters for manuscript writing. It is encouraging its attendees to write letters--personal letters--the kind we used to write to friends and relatives far away and put in an envelope and send with a stamp. I wrote such a letter to an old friend (with a pen, as it happened) four or five years ago. She wrote back (also with a pen on paper and in a stamped envelope) that receiving my letter made her feel like she was a character in a Jane Austen novel. That’s a gift to give to someone! You live long enough, all kinds of ordinary things become rarities.
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