THE MAGIC OF A GENTLE TEACHER

My first  lesson in typing was a surprise to me.  It happened when I was very young - I don’t remember when, but I remember where. I was visiting Auntie Coleman at her tall house on Huron Street. Her niece Helen was living with her, a soft-spoken lady, who suddenly seemed struck by a bright idea. Picture a light bulb above her head. Certainly a sparkle came to her eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses. She would lose no time in teaching her namesake, small Helen - me - how to use a typewriter.

I could barely print my own language - I may have been in first grade. I felt honoured to be picked as a pupil by my gentle cousin Helen. She seemed to believe it inevitable that I and a typewriter would meet sooner or later, and that it might as well be sooner - in fact, immediately. I wonder now if perhaps Auntie was busy writing one of her poems or stories and I was being kept a little out of her way.

Helen steered me to her Remington in a sunlit corner of their dining room, and sat me down in front of it. She showed me where to put my right and left index fingers.

“This is the middle set of letter keys, starting with the “a”. You keep your hands poised above these, and reach up and down to the row above and the row below.”

That made sense. I would be able to pounce upward and downward from a secure home row of keys.

“Good! Now you make sure to rest this finger,” said Helen, lifting the index finger of my left hand, “On the “f”.  This finger goes here,” she said, shifting my right hand over to the right, leaving two keys  untouched in the middle of the middle row of letters, and placing my  right index finger on the “j”.

“There you are, in the right position to move your fingers easily to any letter. Just keep your fingers on the “f” and the “j”, and you don’t have to go far to touch the “g” and “h” in the middle row. Maybe a little further to reach the middle letters up above - “t” and “y”, and the middle letters down below - “v” and “b”. Now you’re all set and ready to type anything you want.”

Helen was delighted with my initiation. I sensed that she was paving the way for me, but to what I was not sure. I felt a little too young to be operating a typewriter, and just  enjoyed the afternoon sunlight coming through the bay window and tapping away in a most professional way. My cousin was determined that never would I become a two-fingered hunter-and-pecker. 

Come to think of it, she was like a swimming instructor by-passing any chance of a beginner floundering around in a frantic dog paddle. Start by teaching a genuine stroke, so that the dog paddle doesn't have a chance against the Australian crawl, its equally elegant but easier cousin, the side stroke or the frog-like moves of the breast stroke.

Helen didn’t make a super typist out of me that sunny afternoon, but she made sure that I would never even start to hunt and peck with two fingers. No matter what, I would always be correctly poised about a keyboard - typewriter or computer.

Was I destined to become a true typist, the kind that rattles off 80 words of English a minute? Time would tell.

Soon it was time for tea with Auntie Coleman, and those melt-in-the mouth cookies from Unser’s bakery on Bloor Street.