“Hey, boys,” comes a lively greeting from a tall, white-haired man, whose cheery voice emanates from an equally upbeat face that gives the impression it has spent a lifetime brimming with friendliness. The man, who is at least as old as I am, is dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a casual blue shirt that matches the color of his fun-loving, twinkling eyes.

My six- and four-year-old grandsons have just entered the assistant lighthouse keeper’s home in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The jovial man, however, isn’t the assistant keeper. He is a tourist, like us, visiting the lighthouse grounds, which are now a museum.

He points toward the corner of what would’ve been a small sitting room. “What’s that, boys?” he asks my grandsons. I haven’t crossed the threshold yet, so I can’t see what he points at.

Without skipping a beat, my six-year-old grandson answers, “That’s a typewriter.”

“Wow,” the man says, now looking at me. “Most kids don’t know that!” He reminds me of my father who would’ve put this kind of question to anyone, young or old, in a museum, hoping the person wouldn’t know the answer, giving him the opportunity to burst into a history lesson. In the absence of strangers, my father would quiz me, “Do you know what this is?”

I smile at the man, and as an explanation, I say, “Their nana is a writer.” But this isn’t why my grandson knows a typewriter when he sees one. None of my grandchildren have seen me use one. I do my writing on a laptop. Although I wrote plenty of college papers on a typewriter, I can’t say I miss it. I made too many mistakes and smeared thick globs of whiteout on typos, which resembled miniature frescos when they dried, but without any artistic flair.

I’m not sure why I blurt out, “Their nana is a writer,” but something in the tall man’s happy manner makes me happy, so I say it because writing makes me happy. I’m already thinking about our encounter as something to write about.

So, why does my six-year-old grandson know that the machine with rows of letters is a typewriter? Because I like to take my grandkids to small museums. A month ago we visited the Old Firehouse and Police Museum. On the second floor in an old office displayed with artifacts, he pointed to a typewriter sitting on a wooden desk and asked, “What’s that?” I explained what it was and how it worked, and that the fire chief used it to type reports about the fires they fought.

The white-haired man moves on to another room in the assistant keeper’s house turned museum. My grandsons and I look at the typewriter. “Can I touch it?” one of them asks. My first impulse is to say no. Instead, I look at the typewriter. I don’t see a do-not-touch sign. If I had, I would’ve said no. In my family there are two kinds of people: those who can’t ignore signs and those who feel they are merely suggestions. But I’m flirting with a technicality because I know museum curators don’t want visitors touching artifacts.

I think back to the mid-1990s when I took my father and my two sons to the same fire and police museum that I recently visited with my grandkids. Inside the museum was an old fire truck, with a hand crank used to start its engine. I came upon my father turning the crank, which was located right below a sign that said: DO NOT TURN THE HAND CRANK.

“Dad,” I said, “you can’t do that. Look at the sign.” I wondered if he thought the engine might roar to life.

“Well, they left the crank here,” my father said, as if the presence of the crank negated the command: DO NOT TURN THE HAND CRANK. The old hand-crank fire truck was still there when I took my grandkids, but the sign was gone and so was the hand crank. I don’t think my father was the only person who turned that crank. He was a mechanic nearly all of his life, and the urge to tinker with mechanical objects never left him.

My grandsons and I are still staring at the typewriter. I think about my father and his belief that signs weren’t meant for him. He routinely ignored handicapped parking and speed limit signs. When he taught me to drive, he said that I could take curves at twenty miles over the posted limit. I stare at the typewriter, thinking about the fingers from the past that pushed its keys, sending thin metal bars with raised letters clacking to an inked ribbon, leaving black words on white paper. My grandsons stare at the typewriter as if it’s a mystical object, but I have no idea what they are thinking.

“You may touch it,” I say, “but very gently, like this.” And, I brush my fingers like feathers across a few keys. There is no one to tell me, “You can’t do that.” There is no one I can answer back to by saying, “Well, there isn’t a sign.”

I add, “Do not push down on the letters.”

Each grandson takes a turn, stroking a few keys softly, like they are a newborn’s forehead. Sensing they’ve been granted a special privilege, they are silent. Neither of them pushes down on a key. But I imagine they think about what it would feel like and how the typewriter would react if they did.

Suddenly, I understand something about my father and the old fire truck and its hand crank. He wanted to feel that crank turn. Perhaps, because he’d never had the opportunity. By the time he was born in 1937, hand-crank cars were a thing of the past. But his father, who opened a gas station and repair shop in 1920, would’ve worked on cars with hand cranks. Perhaps, my father wanted to touch something that linked him back in time to his father.

After all, I enjoyed touching the typewriter keys and wondering about the lighthouse keepers and the documents they typed. Perhaps, in their off-hours, they wrote novels or stories or poems about the solitary life of lighthouse keepers and the stormy moods of Lake Superior.

We move on from the typewriter, looking at a way of life from the early 1900s. An old stove waits for someone to start a fire in it and cook a meal in cast iron pots. Old dishes sit on a scarred table, waiting for a meal to be served upon them. An ancient washing machine waits for someone to load it with soiled clothes. Oil lamps wait to be lit after the sun sets, and an old stuffed chair waits to be filled by a weary person at the end of the day.

Over and over my grandsons ask, “What’s this?” And I explain. Over and over their hands reach to touch an object, and I say, “Don’t touch.” I point to the signs saying, Please, Do Not Touch, which had been absent by the typewriter, but are now everywhere. And each time they withdraw their hands. I can’t ignore an actual sign asking, Please Do Not Touch.

But I’m glad there wasn’t a sign by the typewriter, and I wonder if my dad would’ve pushed the keys.