Yesterday, it being Shabbat, all my electronic devices were turned off. I have a whole day of digital vacation. I usually make myself a stack of books and dive in, but yesterday I had something much different to read.
When my brother and sister-in-law moved away, he gave me a box of my mother's important papers to take care of and a bigger box of miscellaneous letters. I don't think he realized what was in that box. At ALL.
It turned out to be a duke's mixture of old pay stubs, graduation cards, wedding invitations, grant deeds to a house they used to own, some of my father's business correspondences, and letters from friends and family going back to the 1940's! I read virtually all of them over the course of the whole day. I learned some very interesting family history doing so.
Along the way, I also quickly realized that hardly ANY of these people who wrote knew how to fold a letter to get it into the envelope. Seriously. With the exception of my paternal grandmother, those letters were crammed into envelopes in the most bizarre ways! Which made each one hard to get BACK into their respective places after reading!
And another thing I'm going to mention, and if you knew how much I obsess over handwriting, you would appreciate how hard it is to admit what I am about to say. I think the education system has failed by trying to teach children cursive long hand. The reason I say that, is so few people can actually do it legibly, even as adults. And after reading DOZENS AND DOZENS of letters yesterday, from a score or more different people, I feel I can say this with complete authority.
I know there have been people bemoaning the fact that cursive is not taught in some schools now as a travesty of proper educational practice, I still think some modifications need to be made!
I give you an example in the following piece of history from my mother's working career. This was a little card she was given of where and when to meet her supervisor at her new job. The handwriting on this card is just stunning. Stunning I tell you. It's textbook longhand of the first water and a joy to behold:
[Never mind that my mother kept this card for 76 years! ]
The unfaltering certainty of this handwriting is something I can say I have never seen outside of a textbook my whole life. My hat's off to you Dorothy, wherever you are.
She was a wizard level master of :
Learn the Palmer Method of Business Writing - ThePalmerMethod.com
But the painful truth is that most everyone else who has tried to emulate cursive longhand has fallen far short of this shining example.
All this being said, I am fascinated by handwriting. I have gone through several iterations of my handwriting over the years. Always striving to find my own style. And I have proof, because there were a stack of letters my mother had saved that I had written to her over the decades. I was all OVER the place during different phases of my life. I think I have finally settled on something between printing and cursive that suits me.
But who knows. I may have another iteration left. Perhaps I'll give old Palmer another try.
(The suspense is excruciating.)
(Literally.)
(Stop talking about it.)
I was going to say something mean about you only being able to be bookends to ACTUAL words, handwritten or otherwise. But that would be rude. So, I won't.
(I think you sorta crossed a line there, Cupcake.)
Yeah, maybe. But you pushed me.
