adverb: (as the copying of a text) letter for letter

•••

(for Gerry Colón)

I learned to type literatim,
hunting and pecking letter by letter,
as most people do,

in my case, on my parents’ small
manual Smith Corona, standard
black, elite type, which meant

that it was the smaller of the two
available typewriter fonts.
We preferred the elite—

more words per line or page—
and for us wordy writers, we
needed the condensed type

to get said what needed saying.
Though I took a summer school
typing class, it was Mrs. Colón

in Room 206 at Oakmont High
who got me up to speed on her
snazzy IBM Selectric, setting

me before the best typing
machine of its era, directing me
to retype story after story

by novice journalists onto half
sheets of newsprint to be driven
across town to typesetters

at the Press-Tribune, whose
super-speedy fingers transferred
those words into long, slender

columns that, once returned to us,
we delightedly ran through the hot
wax machine, then affixed onto

newspaper-sized sheets that
the P-T magically transformed
into Norse Notes, my second paper.

By then I’d retired my neighborhood
paper, though its name—the Granite
Bay Gazette—would live on at

another high school, born much later,
as I went on to toil at the college newspaper
and then a few others, along with

a magazine and an international
news service, typing, as Gerry Colón
taught me, literatim, pressing

keys on typewriters and typesetting
machines and later computer
keyboards one letter at a time—

accuracy always more important
than speed. Three typos per page
max, carefully fixed with penciled

proofreaders’ marks. I hear her
still as I type, the same questions
I would direct to my college

journalism students decades later:
Did you check the spelling of
the first AND last name? Just once?

Check again. You can’t be too careful.