The death of a beautiful hand

My mother had what some used to call a "beautiful hand." She wrote well. Her penmanship was fine-- not fancy, not garish, but fine. I remember her being motherly--and teacherly (she was a teacher). If I was sitting at the kitchen bar preparing to write something, she'd tell me to sit up straight because good posture is a must when putting the pen to paper. 

Historians claim "penmanship" (does anyone use that word at all anymore) was important only for a few years of human history. For most of human history, we indicated consent to by way of an X, or a splotch of ink from a thumb or forefinger. People--ordinary people--didn't write at all. 

Universal education didn't really begin until a couple hundred years ago. In the old folks home where my father-in-law resides, there are few college graduates, and a goodly number of residents who never attended high school. Undoubtedly, they rigorously practiced their handwriting for hours and in grade school, then hardly ever used it.

Beautiful, flowing handwriting has become little more than an art form. Few of us sit down with a pen and write anything anymore; we tap out what we want said on a gadzillion keyboards. And that's okay. I'm a little self-conscious anyway about my "penmanship" these days. It groans and croaks and angles along like a tipsy old gent doing his best not to trip. There's nothing elegant about it. 

I'm not particularly surprised at its shakiness when I  watch it flow from my pen. Was a time when my hand unthinkingly followed my brain's directives. These days, it's a little shaky. Some of its hesitancy is what one might expect from unemployment. 

Toward the end of her life, my mother-in-law, a great supporter of Hallmark, got too the point where she hated to send cards out because she couldn't handle her own shaky "hand." My mother also read the signs of the times with great anguish. Even though she never lost her mind, her letters ended long before she slipped into her last good night because she could no longer perform her finest cursive at a level acceptable to the stickler she'd always been.

Now, the old man in me could move easily into a howling lament: "what's wrong with us today, that we don't care about how we write? Even in grade school, my son's penmanship bordered on sheer wickedness. I don't know that he ever learned cursive. Even today, if I see his hand somewhere--a rare thing--I can't help thinking we lost him. My mother would be appalled.

Yet, here's the truth, so help me, Bill Gates. Researchers claim in our present age people write more every day than they did when mother was practicing her finest longhand. We write tons and tons of things. By the end of my teaching career, I swear there were more better writers than there were when I began teaching, in part because so many students wrote so very much more on their own--emails, tweets, snapchats. I don't know that they had any more to say than my parents did at their age, but they were likely more adept at putting down words because they did it--they "wrote stuff"--far, far more often.

So, I'm okay with making calligraphy an art form and dropping it off at the museum, where it can be oohed and ahhed over, like turquoise jewelry or the art of the Dutch masters. 

We live in another age altogether, an age where our options are limited only by the fonts we choose. 

After all, if need be, I can print like a monk copiously working at holy writ.