for my father
Electric Eraser
In my parents’ basement is a vintage Bruning Electric Erasing Machine. What sounds like something from a Roald Dahl book is actually a drafting tool once used by my father during his career as a mechanical designer. The electric eraser is hefty, all metal, about eight inches long. At one end is a narrow silver tip from which a replaceable, cylindrical eraser emerges. The tip widens to a black barrel-shaped holder, the width of a drinking glass, to wrap your palm around. A long cord protrudes from the holder. Plug it in and the tip vibrates. I try out the electric eraser one holiday, my luggage strewn across the finished basement floor, when I notice the peculiar thing lying on our old computer desk on top of a paper of dimensions and calculations penciled in my father’s square print. My ten-year-old son is curious, impressed. My father’s first initial and last name are inscribed on the barrel.
History of the Eraser
Erasers are made of rubber or vinyl, along with an abrasive such as pumice. Rubber, a vegetable gum produced by the South American tree Hevea brasiliensis, formerly called caoutchouc, was given the name rubber in 1972 due to its ability to rub out black lead marks. The first integrated pencil and eraser was patented in the U.S. in 1858. Today, most erasers are made of synthetic rubber.
How Medieval Scribes Erased
Powdered pumice was sometimes used by medieval scribes as an eraser.
But more often, the same knife used for sharpening the scribe’s quill pen was also used for erasing mistakes–by physically scraping the ink from the page. In medieval times, the knife was as essential to writing as the pen.
Should an entire page need to be erased, the parchment could be immersed in milk, covered in flour, and, finally, kept under pressure while drying to prevent wrinkles. Then, the parchment could be used again for new text. Gradually, over time, this often produced a palimpsest, a document where traces of the earlier writing would reappear behind the latter.
Losing my Eraser
In third grade, my elementary school tested my IQ to see if I should be placed in a school for gifted children. Someone I didn’t know led me down the narrow stairway to the art room, the only basement classroom in our building, to administer the test. I remember having to replicate pictures from a spiral-bound notebook propped in front of me using blocks divided along the diagonal so that each face had one white and one red triangle. I remember being asked questions such as what would you do if your house was on fire?
Halfway through the test, I lost my Paper Mate Pink Pearl Eraser, one of those big rectangular ones with the beveled edges. I must have dropped it. All I could think about while attempting to answer the questions was my eraser on the floor under the table. How could I retrieve it without interrupting the exam? I didn’t want to leave it there in the basement art room all by itself. I needed it. And, I thought, it needed me: to give it life, a purpose.
I’m not sure if I ever got my eraser back, but I do remember the IQ test results. I remember my mom getting off the phone. I had scored in the high normal range. I wouldn’t be changing schools. I was nothing special. Just highly motivated, they said.
Liquid Paper
In the 1950’s, Bette Nesmith Graham, a painter, secretary, and single mother, invented liquid paper. Tired of having to retype entire documents to make them error-free in the office, she used her experience correcting mistakes as an artist–by painting over them–to invent a solution to her problem. In her kitchen, she mixed tempura-based paint to create a color that matched her office’s stationery. Then, whenever she made a typo, she simply painted over it and corrected the mistake. Twelve years later, her product–originally named Mistake Out, then changed to Liquid Paper–was a million-dollar enterprise, owned by her and employing her son and his friends. Her company was known for its positive culture, with its on-site library and child-care center. Her son later became a guitarist for the popular 1960s band The Monkees.
Lo-Hed Paper
My father worked at AAI Corporation in Hunt Valley, Maryland, an aerospace and defense development manufacturing firm, from 1969-1989. He holds a bachelor’s degree in math from Johns Hopkins University. He left our house early in the morning each day and returned by supper, an important-looking work badge still clipped to his dress shirt. Often, he brought home reams of scrap paper, blank on the back, for my sisters and I to draw on. Printed on the front, under the trade name Lo-Hed, were the prices and sizes of products (he tells me now) used by AAI: overhead hoists, bridge cranes, rail runners, railroad car winches, and shipboard equipment for the Navy.
I never quite understood what he did, and I still don’t.
Correction Ribbon
The summer after eighth grade, I typed my first novel on my mother’s electric typewriter in the cool basement of our unairconditioned ranch house, bored while my older sisters worked at their part-time jobs. Once Had, I titled it, a Dickensian romance, signed with a pen name: Christian Michael Clarke.
The typewriter had a correction ribbon, so if I made a mistake, I could press a key that back-spaced the carriage and lifted a ribbon with white powder in front of the letter I wanted to remove. I pressed that letter again and poof–it was gone.
When the correction ribbon ran out, I sometimes used White-Out or correction tabs. The correction tabs were about two inches long and one inch wide. They came in a little plastic container with an oval-shaped open window on the top. One end of the plastic flipped up so you could pull out a tab and slide it back after use. When you made a mistake, you simply back-spaced the carriage, held the correction tab over the typo with the glossy side facing you and the powdery side facing the paper. When you typed the incorrect letter again, it was covered up in white on the page, and appeared clear on the correction tab. In effect, the correction tab recorded all of your mistakes like an alphabet soup of transparent noodles in a creamy broth, until you had used the whole thing and your mistakes blended into a crystal clear oblivion.
100 Words Per Minute
In high school, I needed half a credit of practical arts, so I took a semester of typing. If you came to class and completed all of the assignments and tests in the “A” range, you were awarded a “C” on your report card. To get an “A” in the class, you had to come before or after school and do extra assignments. I was livid. I was also taking AP US History, Spanish 2, Algebra 2, and many other academic classes, plus playing on the field hockey team and working a part-time job as a cashier at Weis Markets. Why would I put this much effort into a class I only took to meet a requirement? But my stay-at-home mother willingly drove me to school early and picked me up late a couple of days a week until I had completed all of the extra assignments and earned the grade that wouldn’t disrupt my 4.0 GPA. The result: at one time I was typing 100 net words per minute. The formula for calculating net words per minute is:
Gross Words Per Minute – Number of Errors/Time in Minutes = Net Words Per Minute
Now, thirty years later, I can still type 72 words per minute with 99% accuracy.
Computer-Aided Design
Sometime in the 1980’s my father went back to college to take a course in AUTOCAD, or computer-aided design. Computer-aided design allows for making two- and three-dimensional drawings digitally. One benefit of computer-aided design is that it reduces errors. By automating repetitive tasks like symbol placement, alerting users to common mistakes during the design process, and making adjustments in the various views simultaneously, computer-aided design greatly minimizes the potential for errors.
My father hated computer-aided design. I’m not sure he ever finished the class or used it at work. What I imagine is that he loved the feel of his hand on the page, the scrape and pressure of the pencil, the sharpening of pencils, the vibration of the electric eraser, the straight edges of rulers and the slant of a drafting table along his forearms. He had a drafting table in our basement. I imagine he did not like the clicking of keys, sliding of a mouse, light of a screen, staring straight on at something whose computational power could not be readily understood rather than looking down at a few tools that, worked by his own hands and brain, could create something nearly unimaginable.
What followed was a layoff from AAI, new jobs for shorter periods at other places, less work. Eventually, he left the field and worked for a few years as a car salesman, then a custodian at an elite private high school, just so he and my mother would have health benefits until medicare kicked in, and he could start collecting his AAI pension.
The End of Erasing
Erase something and it’s gone forever; delete something and it’s harder to find, but still exists.
Perhaps this is where the paradox begins. When I erase, through the physical act of erasing or the imperfect act of writing over my error, the mistake still feels like it exists: something I once did, something I can’t forget. Something messy.
When I compose on a computer and delete, my mistakes feel so suddenly gone from view it’s as if they never existed at all, like something I thought I saw in the corner of my vision that turned out to be a strand of my own hair or a reflection on a window.
Erasing might delete something from existence, but what deleting does is erase any possibility of a palimpsest.
“Chains of Love” by Erasure (1988)
How can I explain / when there are few words I can choose / How can I explain when words get broken / Do you remember there was a time ahaha / when people on the street / were walking hand in hand / they used to talk about the weather / making plans together / days would last forever
Life Mistakes
I always wondered why my father wasn’t a history professor. Ask him one question about the Civil War or any American president and he could talk for hours.
I remember the literature class my father took at Johns Hopkins, the books he read, how my sisters and I also picked them up and read most of them when we grew older: Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie, Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, Deliverance by James Dickey, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Like the electric eraser, these books still don a shelf in my parents’ basement.
A teacher myself now, I often think about my father finishing out his career as a custodian at that elite private school, how the teachers there didn’t know his life or work history, his degree, his 20 years of work as a mechanical designer, his four years in the Marines. They didn’t know how he studied for that degree in our tiny ranch house (blueprints designed and drawn by him), working full time, with three children, how my mother used to whisper “Shhh! You’re father’s studying!” while she mopped the kitchen. How one night I slowly opened their bedroom door, snuck across the carpet, army crawled under the bed, and scared him from his studies with a gleefully received “Boo!” when I emerged from beneath the bedskirt on the other side directly behind his desk chair.
In the last decade of his working life, my father had been reduced to his ability to clean and organize, to that meticulously folded stack of handkerchiefs I would find in his middle dresser drawer while exploring my parents’ room. I think about him cleaning desks and bathrooms, tidying up after other kids’ education, like a well-learned immigrant considered ignorant in a new country, only this a country defined not by geography but by time and progress, my father’s displacement defined not by travel, but by stasis.
We often wonder where a person goes when they die. I am beginning to wonder where a person goes when they retire.
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A Parable
My son, a fourth-grader, has been assigned an animal report. He is to observe an animal for seven days, then write a two page report detailing what it looks like, how it moves, what it eats, and where it lives. Proofreading the final draft, I see he has written “a lot” as one word. I begin shaking the bottle of White-Out, which he will use to disconnect the cursive “a” from the “l”, and tell him this story:
Once, in graduate school, working on my MFA in creative nonfiction, I, too, spelled “a lot” as one word, albeit typed. I must have done it before, because my professor, a poet, wrote “TWO WORDS, DAMMIT!” in all caps on my paper next to the offending term. I have never made that mistake again.
Disenfranchisement
Artificial intelligence has begun erasing the lovely voices of my students who used to trip over their syntax like untied shoelaces. It has made perfect reckonings from personal narratives that once ended so abruptly a door felt slammed in my face. It has made tame gas fireplaces out of persuasive essays that once fumed around charred wood cut by hand beneath untended chimneys, no spark or soot or backdraft, so that reading their opinions now I no longer feel the heat of their passions as if the whole house might burn down. Instead, their efficiency, their grammatical perfection, their overuse of parallel structure has the effect of a mild sedative.
How could I have forsaken them? All these years of grading. Of education. The point is to imitate but still sound like yourself. Never to imitate and sound like someone–or, worse, something–else.
Creativity has always been as much about what’s discarded as about what remains. Mastery as much about breaking rules as being well-trained.
Naturalization
I feel like the chair has been pulled out from under me–the chair, the back ache, the carpal tunnel from all those hours of grading my overloaded freshman composition classes in my 24 credit hour semester course load.
I loved the labor of it. I did. It’s too late, but I know that now. The image of the page on the computer screen the Rosetta stones of my students’ brains, their fingerprints all over the words, thumb pounding the spacebar like hail on a hot summer sidewalk, a warm cat walking by, tail brushing a nose and making them sneeze, a chug of Red Bull or Monster, all the sensory experiences of their composition oozing out between their words as I read them. Now, I do not know what to do with the silence between the words their LLM’s generate. Or, I do not know what to listen for. Or, I do not know how to teach them to teach artificial intelligence to sound like themselves. Or, I do not care to.
I wish I were back in that cool summer basement of my childhood home pressing the heavy keys on my mother’s electric typewriter, my father’s mechanical eraser as yet undiscovered, still in use at his work.
I wish a pseudonym was the only way we could lie about who we are.
Jill Sisson Quinn is the author of Sign Here if You Exist and Other Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2020) and Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan (Apprentice House Press, 2010). Her essays have appeared in Orion, Natural History, OnEarth Magazine, and elsewhere. They have been selected for reprint in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 and Best American Essays 2016. She is a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award.