I’m the Only One That Matters

I spent a small portion of today practicing my penmanship. God knows that I could do with some practice. You know that your writing leaves a lot to be desired when you can’t even read it.

 

Ever since I picked up that ink I have had the desire to write like man is supposed to write. I long for beautiful flowing lines and to have people not care what it is that I have written, just so long as they can look at the script. Yeah…that will happen. I think I was of the first generation that penmanship was let slide in our education system. Perhaps the teachers that I had were just a bunch of burn outs that were on the edge and couldn’t care less about their students any more. Whatever the reason, we spent a lot less time making sure that the round letters were round and the straight letters were straight than my parents did.

There was this girl in grade school called Rosanna Dawson that I was in love with. She didn’t know or care if I were alive or dead. She lived beside the hydro right of way and because of that she probably suffers from some kind of electrically induced seizures. It serves her right for not liking me back in the day. I bring up Rosanna because she had almost perfect penmanship. Every letter was the same height, all of the a`s looked like perfect a`s and her capital s`s were to die for. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that she used a typewriter. This was long before fancy fonts were available on personal computers. Just about the only thing I remember about Rosanna is how lovely her writing was and probably still is. Well, not when she is having one of those seizures of course.

If I take my time I can make pretty passable writing, but I rarely take my time and to tell the truth, I am more into writing on the computer now. I am faster typing than I am writing. A couple of weeks ago while I was working with Brendan I mentioned a letter that I sent him while he was in Katimavic. www.katimavik.org/ I bought some of those alphabet pasta, sorted out all of the letters and pressed them into plasticine to form words, sentences and paragraphs. I figured it would cheer him up while he was away from home. Turns out that he has no memory of the letter at all. Now, I have to find a photo of the letter to show him that I did make the letter and I did actually write him while he was away.

Louise and her friend Donna would send each other odd letters. One of them that Louise wrote was written from the perspective of Astro the dog on the Jetsons cartoon. Write Rrorge. Reverything ras rritten rike ris, rusing ran “R” rin ront rof reach rword. Hers was much better than mine. She also wrote a letter on the inside of a paper bag, covering all five of the sides.

 

I think that we miss something by not writing letters to each other. Future historians won’t be able to examine letters from the famous to their friends and relatives because all of those letters and now emails or tweets.

Anyways, I hope to keep practicing my penmanship and in the near future I would like to send a letter with the Christmas card that looks just like it was printed using a fancy font on the computer. No one will probably know but me; but in the end, I’m the only one that really matters.