birthday type

 

What kicks off my predawn thoughts as it's too dark early to risk waking Caroline by texting Happy Birthday and sending little red hearts? I'll wait until it's at least after six o'clock in Tallahassee.

It's a news headline that reads, "The State Department wants memos written in Calibri now, not Times New Roman" and calls to mind my own struggle with typefaces, fonts, for use on +Time.

As well as trying B for Bold and other notions, over its dozen years, my +Time blogposts have used a few different fonts as I sought to overcome their turning out too faint for easy reading once published. I wanted a naturally heavy-looking sans serif font with some individual letter designs that appealed to me. Did you ever notice that letters, both uppercase and lowercase, have different designs in different typefaces? Some of the letters, lowercase "G" especially, and some lowercase "Z", have fascinating designs? In my search, one, Wunderlich, stood out as especially readable, and I recall liking its lower case "g" and a couple of other letters. But Wunderlich, just as with trying to make everything Bold, wasn't carried forward when I punched Publish on Blogger. As well, scrolling Blogger offerings almost endlessly, I couldn't find Wunderlich to add to my Font List on +Time. 

Eventually, though hopefully not finally, after having selected more than a dozen possibilities that I added, never used, and now need to go back and delete from my Font List, I settled on Arial Rounded, which is extraordinary for being flat, unremarkable, insipid, innocuous; but which fit my search criteria for being heavy and bold, and which showed up on Blogger's approved list. So it's been Arial Rounded for some Time now.

When I started typing for college papers, two characteristics were commonly available on typewriters: Pica and Elite. At 10 characters per inch, Pica was easier to read, but at 12 cpi, Elite was better for a wordy student accommodating his professor's limit of four, ten or a dozen pages (I never got into a professor's word limit specification). 

Other research and term paper specs in college and seminary were page size (8 1/2 x 11), one inch margins all around, and double spaced. IDK, but the font may always have been American Typewriter, a serif typeface that always seemed especially common in Pica size but a bit more sophisticated (!) in Elite.

Of course when IBM Selectric typewriters came along they immediately obsoleted ordinary typewriters' basket of jammable type bars, offering font balls that not only eliminated jamming and allowed unlimited typing speed, but that also gave practically unlimited options of fonts and sizes. I remember 1960s excitement as, one by one, Navy offices were approved for acquisition of an IBM Electric. First the commanding officer's secretary, then trickle down to the rest of us.

And I recall that at one duty station, speeches typed for the admiral always had to be double- or triple-spaced, in 10 cpi Orator font. The admiral then marked it up with yellow highlighter for easy delivery.

When computers came along, personal computers, desktops and laptops and printers with them, civilization was turned upside down, and in one all time favorite television commercial a scary ignorant 

savage came out of the jungle, looked over the shoulder of the guy to see what he was doing, and asked, "Is that an IBM 350?"

Life has changed, changes, and will change, and evolution is the nature of all that is, including that a child is someone who all too quickly passes through your life on their way to becoming a mature human being in their own right.

Happy birthday, Caroline! Nana and I well remember the evening of January 19th, 2003. We'd invited our brand new Interim Priest over for supper: Arnold Bush was one of the nicest and kindness people I've ever known. He also was the most persistent, insistent, and oblivious! His sermons were almost comically long and the subject of much clock watching, and we loved him dearly. 

Arnold was oblivious to Time. We had a nice supper for him at The Old Place. As we sat visiting in the family room after supper, the phone rang, your mom saying they were on the way to the hospital. Nana and I immediately became antsy, noticeably itching and squirming and looking at our watches antsy to leave for Tallahassee, but Fr Arnold was oblivious as the hours passed. Finally, he rose to leave, we said our goodbyes at the back door, followed him out the door, locked it, and, as Arnold got in his car and drove away, we got in our car and drove away behind him.

As it turned out, there was no hurry! When we arrived at the hospital in Tallahassee, your Dad came out and briefed us, and we set in for the wait: long hours, or at least I recall it to have been so, until your Dad came out and told us Caroline Margaret had arrived. Caroline for me, Carroll. I was overwhelmed. I still am this morning, twenty years on. Twenty years, a college junior and the only person I love so much as to wear a Seminole hat! Happy birthday! 

Papa