A Lifetime of Typing for $25.00

 

by Pa Rock

Determined Typist

  

Little did I realize that the one semester of high school typing, which was taught by Miss Pace who only worked at our school one year, would be the single most important class of my high school career, but it was.  I left that class, which I think was in my junior year, with the ability to type forty-words-a-minute without error, and that rate and ability has remained rather constant over the past sixty years.  Today walking and typing are my two primary forms of physical activity, and I have little doubt that as I am flung from this mortal coil, my fingers will be the last parts of my body to experience movement - and which fingers are moving will depend on who is present at my demise.

During my life I have written three newspaper columns, one on "safety" which ran in the local weekly newspapers for a year or so, another which was a country-oriented humor column about a fictional group of old people in a small town who specialized in going to public sales (auctions) and getting into trouble of the ridiculous sort, and a third which was a genealogy column that appeared in quite a few weekly area newspapers and ran for over five years.

During the time that I was focused on the genealogy column, I also did some freelance articles for national genealogy and history magazines.  Most of those articles later appeared in Pa Rock's Ramble.  The installments in the humor column referenced above, "Doin' the Sales with Rusty Pails," have also all run individually in The Ramble."

This blog, which has run almost daily since November of 2007, has also consumed quit a bit of my time.  Today's entry is 6,741, most of which were written by me, but with a few helpful assists from guest bloggers along the way.  (The number should be 6,742, but Google, a.k.a. "the iron fist," pulled one entry ten years after it had been posted because of a complaint.  Bastards!)

I have scratched together a few poems over the years.  Most were published to low acclaim in this column, and one, a limerick, made its way into a now defunct national publication called Reminisce.  My few short stories have been featured here in The Ramble, but none have been published anyplace respectable - though I think a couple could make it into print if I would get off my lazy butt and put some more work into them.  I did get two "honorable mentions" in writing contests in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

I like to write dialogue, something for which I seem to have a good ear, and I have written a half-dozen or so one-act plays and one full length play.  My first effort was  as a class project in a Science Fiction Literature class in college, and the professor liked it enough that he turned the short play into a classroom production - which inspired me to knock out a few more one-acts.  One of those won a local community theatre writing contest which rewarded me with $25 and a staged production of the work.  The same play was later presented on stage by the drama department of a local community college.  But after that my race to replace Neil Simon fizzled as I put my trusty old standard typewriter aside and got on with the business of aging aggressively.

I tried my hand at another play, this time a full-length effort, twelve years ago after open-heart surgery that resulted in several weeks of recuperation time at home with nothing to keep me occupied other than this blog.  I  seemed to enjoy the final product more than others who read it, but one community director at the Air Force base where I was working did see some merit in the effort and kept threatening to have her group perform it.  Eight years and two Air Force bases later she eventually brought it to the stage, and two years after that her group put on one of my earlier one-acts that had never been produced.  

Watching characters that you have created walk across the stage saying words that you have put in their mouths is a heady experience!

Tomorrow, Lord willin' and the cricks don't rise, I'll pull back the curtain on a couple of my current writing efforts, in addition to this damnable blog!