By the time you read this, hopefully with the paragraph markers intact, I’ll be in Arizona and on my way to Tucson for the Tucson Festival of Books.  I’m looking forward to it, but I’m concerned about my step situation. Spending hours in cars and planes doesn’t leave much room walking.

But today I have a bone to pick.  Yes, I’m a bit tottery and coming up on age 79, but I don’t think of myself as being “old.” I think of myself as … well … being.

When it comes to TV viewing my choice is mysteries of one kind or another, both true crime and not.  Naturally, when a new crime show called Elisbeth premiered last week, we watched it.

By the way, auto correct does NOT like that name, but Elisbeth (This is the correct spelling!)  is a seemingly scatterbrained but still very smart investigator.

If you’ve not yet watched the first episode, here’s a spoiler alert.  The story has to do with a drama professor who has been routinely taking advantage of the attractive young would be actresses in his program.

Part of the plot has to do with texts supposedly sent by the victims after they’re already deceased, thus making it possible for the killer to have a verifiable alibi.

Everything is going along just swimmingly for the bad guy until Elisbeth notices that the time-critical texts all have double spaces at the end of sentences rather than just one.

“See there?”  she says.  “The victim didn’t write these last texts.  All of her earlier ones only have one space.  The last ones have two.  That’s something old people do.”

Yup, guilty as charged.  In Mr. Biba’s typing class at Bisbee High School, two spaces was the standard, and I can’t seem to teach my “old dog” fingers the new one-space trick.

Over the course of more than forty years of writing and hence typing, I’ve noticed that my publishers have all switched over from two spaces to one.  Rather than disrupting my concentration with the one space/two space dichotomy when I’m writing, I wait until the manuscript is finished.  Then, before I send it to my editors, I do a global search and replace, changing all two spaces to one.

So now this “old” gal is going to go down the hall and get her packing done because she’s about to be on the road again.

I’ll bet when Willie Nelson was writing that song, he used two spaces too, so from one old gal to one old guy, thanks for that.   It’s a song that seems to work for both of us.

Please note.   The above message is entirely of the two-space variety and will remain so.