There’s a word that won’t be around long.
Remember your first day of first grade when you got that big, fat pencil and the brownish, grainy paper with printed blue lines about half an inch apart? I do. I literally remember that day 53 years ago, and even at the age of six there was something in me that thrilled at the prospect of crafting ideas into words in my brain and transmitting them to paper through my hands. I loved it from the beginning.
And for years they kept on us about our penmanship. We spent time in class working on it. We were graded on it. Mine got pretty good. Attractive, even. Especially for a man, women would say later. I never really understood that but it sounded like a backhanded compliment. I didn’t dot my I’s with circles or hearts, for God’s sake.
By the time I entered my senior year of high school I had probably written the equivalence of War and Peace in longhand. (Longhand. That’s another word your grandchildren won’t need to know.) And then, came a turning point in my life. Mr. Moore, my high school counselor, talked me into taking a typing class.
Typing!
Listen, in the sixties only girls took typing because only secretaries used it. For a boy to take typing was as odd and as certain to elicit rude comments as a boy taking home economics. (I don’t think that was allowed. Seriously. Never saw a boy in Home-Ec.) But, good old Mr. Moore told me he thought it would be a good thing for me to learn to type. I had excellent grades in English classes. My teachers gave me high marks for my essays. Mr. Moore foresaw a possibility that I might become a writer at some point in my life and thought I should know how to type. Besides, he added as something of an afterthought…
…I would be the only boy in a class of 35 girls!
I was sold. It turned out there was one other boy in the class, Gerry Smith, and that was very cool because Gerry was a good guy and a friend since kindergarten. He was also a star football player and Student Council President. Nobody was going to make fun of Gerry and I was his typing class wing man.
And now, 41 years later, I tap away at keyboards all day long.
When it occurs to me I thank my lucky stars for Mr. Moore and his wisdom.
But, my attractive (especially for a man!) penmanship? Pffft! I can barely sign my name anymore and am rarely expected to do so. When I do it’s on one of those tiny credit-card-swipe machine plastic windows with the pen that’s not a pen. On those things my signature looks like I am stricken with an advanced case of palsy.
I never use a checkbook anymore. Maybe once a month.
I am only rarely called upon to sign a legal document of some sort and in those times I really don’t care if my signature is attractive or even legible. Far from it. Legibility is a cry for attention. It’s the pathetic sign of a man in need of self-respect and purpose: a follower, a drone. In fact, I have been led to believe that a proper, manly signature on a line above my name impressively typed by a bespectacled legal secretary shouldn’t be legible at all. It should be a large, John Hancock-bold, “D” followed by a rapidly diminishing, “I’m-a-busy-man!” squiggle.
But several times a year I have to write in birthday and Christmas cards and this is a sore trial.
A palsy-like signature simply won’t do. I must express loving thoughts in a deeply personal, though somewhat formal way. And I must do this in longhand.
I always screw it up. Always.
I misspell words my brain has known intimately for decades. I know the letters but my withered, retarded hand isn’t up to the challenge. I have to cross out these words and correct them. In ink. Pathetic. Or, I leave out a word altogether, or I think of an adoring adjective as an afterthought and am forced to print it between the lines in tiny letters with a little insertion arrow > to complete the thought.
I misjudge the distance from my script to the edge of the card and must squeeze a long word into a teeny-tiny space.
The pen sputters and spasms. Barely legible, here, Bic blots there.
By the time I’m finished with a card it looks like it was written by a palsied, slow-witted six-year-old.
I am waiting for the day technology gives us the best of both worlds: a greeting card which is printed but at the same time animated with a moving picture of me and my actual voice, expressing my deep and abiding love and friendship for the recipient of the card. No longhand required.
You know, like the pictures in The Daily Prophet — the newspaper of Harry Potter’s wizard world.
Would you be shocked to know they’re working on it? Seriously, look here.
Penmanship?
A generation from now we won’t even have pens and pencils.
That’s okay with me. I’m just sayin’…
I know some people miss those beautifully hand-crafted letters that took several days to write and several more to arrive. Nostalgia keeps a heart warm but it doesn’t have anything at all to do with reality. The trick is to live with your heart in both places at once.
I’m glad you write. I’m glad you type, so you can get those thoughts down quicker. I laugh when I read in your words what I feel when writing out cards.
But I have to say…I have old emails from my son that I read and re-read. But when I come across one of his letters from boot camp, it touches my heart that he took so much time and effort to write. I want to see his familiar writing. It somehow makes me feel closer. Works the same with my departed mom, dad and aunt too!
Yeah. Great point. I’m just sayin’, keep those letters in the family ‘cuz those days are gone.
All my t-shirts have a pocket. I feel naked without a pen.
The computer is an efficient tool for getting one’s thoughts recorded quickly, but sometimes it’s good to write slowly and deliberately, the way that using a pen or pencil forces me to do. And the silky feel of a smooth-writing pen on fine paper is a real pleasure to me. Besides, there’s personality in penmanship that all the fancy fonts in the world can’t convey. I like technology as much as the next person, but I’m not ready to throw out my old “hand tools” quite yet.
Same here, but it seems penmanship is really a thing of the past. I read a statistic that a percentage of college students can’t write in cursive, and a few of them didn’t even know what cursive was! Somehow, I just don’t think a love letter would be the same when texted instead of hand-written.
It’s true! The longer we go without writing in longhand, the more illegible the occasional note.
All the way through college when I wrote my essays, up to a length of ten pages, mind you, I always wrote them out long hand at first. It was my way of forcing myself to re-read and edit. I was never a fantastic wordsmith but I could usually muster passing grades on essays on a first attempt without much though, but if I really wanted to get a good grade (and more importantly produce a piece of work for which I’d be proud) some editing would be required. And since we weren’t allowed to hand in hand-written essays, I would be forced to retype. And thereby forced to edit. It seemed to work.
Of course, maybe I’d have felt differently about hand-writing all of my essays if I wasn’t an Engineering major.
Gordy was took Home Ec for the same reason. Only he didn’t have to cook. He tasted and flirted. You’ll have to ask him someday about it.