Never did write that novel, but still a storyteller and a BSer

I learned to type in high school because I hoped to write the great American novel like Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and guys like that.

I believe I upset my mom with part of my plan, though.

She was glad I wanted to type, but it didn’t come easy to me “like manna from heaven,” one of her favorite sayings.

Mom had taught typing, shorthand and business stuff to high schoolers years before, I got the vibe she expected me to sit at a typewriter and with genetic, kinetic energy flowing to my fingertips, knock out 60 words per minute.

Well, she didn’t actually say that.

One day she handed me a typing book saying, “Read it, learn it.”

I didn’t.

I signed up for a typing class.

My teacher was one of Mom’s former “comadres” she knew back before she retired from teaching.

I mean, looking back, I remember it felt weird being in that typing class the first few sessions: Me and some other dude were the only guys in a class of 32.

Typing grew on me and soon I was knocking out 60 wpm.

I should have taken shorthand -- my momma said I should -- but THAT looked too difficult.

These days when I’m interviewing folks and taking notes, I wish I had.

Over the years I went from pounding the keys on an old, manual typewriter that was my mom’s after World War II to my very own electric typewriter to a word processor and then here in the future on a computer.

During the 18-wheel driver part of my life I needed to send an email while I was stopped in Phoenix at the company dispatch center.

It was a Friday night at the dispatcher’s office and the room was full of drivers.

I pounded away at the keyboard on my email.

Soon, the room was totally quiet.

It caught my attention.

I turned around and all the guys in the room, about 12 of them, were staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“We just ain’t never seen a man type so fast,” one of the guys said.

“Are you a guy sent from corporate to spy on us?” another guy said.

I laughed.

“I’m a driver like y’all, I like being on the road and seeing America. Maybe I’ll write a book. I’m also a BSer and a storyteller,” I said.

In polite company “BSer” translates as “big story-er,” a teller of big stories.

I mean, after all, that’s what I originally set out to do.

I wanted to pound out that great American novel when I set out from my parents’ house years ago.

Write that book, then sit back at the old hacienda and get royalty checks in the mail.

It might have helped if I had some idea what my great American novel might’ve been about.

“I set out down the road on my own to write that book and there was a deep chuckle from the sky,” I’ve told folks over the years.

“Boy, you ain’t got nothin’ to put in a book. Let me give you some things to write about.”

And so the life adventures began.

And the voice?

With a wink and a grin I tell folks, “It was the good Lord. I know it ’cause it came from the sky and the Lord speaks with a Southern accent.”

I also remind them I’m a storyteller and a BSer.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

[email protected]