My husband has decided he wants to buy a new laptop computer for me. More specifically, he told me I needed one which had a screen I could see (and has all of the letters), and with keys large enough that I didn't commit the heinous number of typos I tend to make my own. As my informal editor (and adorable man), he has the right to make such requests, and, while spending the money killed me initially, I now see his points.

I never realized what a boon it might be to have all of the keyboard keys. Intact. And with keys not gummed together with age and food items I'm sure that were dropped in there and had reformed into something semi-solid.

Years ago, I belonged to a friendly group of writers in a small town at the base of Mt.Rainier in Washington State. A small bunch of 8 or so of us met regularly under old growth alder trees at the end of an unpaved, rock road in an antique barn behind the host's main house. There, every Thursday evening was spent munching popcorn and sipping drinks as we pored over the prose of one another from 7-9 pm, and were kept company by myriad leaning, painted portraits of in a style reminiscent of early Limner paintings.

One of the ladies in the group had sold her computer to a friend who was also in our writer's circle who had a need of a faster system. I remembered her telling the story of the excitement of her new system. She was writing her novel, and, as her fingers flew across the keys, she revealed her tales for us weekly. Unfortunately, one key had the tendency to stick to the point where she finally pried the key from the board. She said, "I removed the key, and, seeing that it was apparent some liquid had been spilled inside the keyboard (otherwise in perfect shape), I sucked the back of the key to clean it. Then I replaced the key and it functioned with no problems ever since.

I loved her ingenuity. I never thought to deal with sticky keys in this way.

At the following writer's meeting, she was absent, but her friend who had sold her the computer had come to keep us company in that barn near the mountains. While we crunched and smacked our lips (at the many flavors popcorn salt apparently came in) and marked manuscripts, one of the members said to her, "Well, Judy is sure enjoying that computer you passed along to her! Myrna blushed ever so slightly. "I feel badly," she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice ever-so-slightly. "I think a few of the keys stick slightly." We nodded, all remembering the story of the sticky key from the previous week.

"My cat peed on that keyboard, you know."

What I took away from that moment is the obvious fact that even though certain keys might stick like the dickens, I bought my last laptop used, and stuck those keys will remain.

In fact, it's a testament to my ingenuity that, as a writer, I've been fully without the "w" key for the entirety of the last year. Rather than take the key off and give it a good spit-sucking to, I became bound and determined to just use words that didn't have "w" in them. This has, overall, enhanced my ability to be creative with the other 25 letters of the English alphabet.