WINEDALE — Here at the old country house in Washington County, on a day of near-perfect weather when everything should be working right, the computer I write on has gotten tired of me.
It doesn’t like the way I spell certain words. It argues about my grammar and sentence structure. When this happens, I can’t get anything done so I turn the thing off and walk away.
But right now, I’ve got a deadline lurking, and I need to work. So I decided to try something new — write the column by hand.
What that means is writing words with a pen or a pencil on a sheet of paper. Remember that process?
Once I get through, I’ll need to type the written words into the computer so they can be sent to the Chronicle. But by then, that machine ought to be rested and behaving itself.
Creating sentences with a pen seemed strange to me at first. I hadn’t written as much as a weak paragraph by hand in maybe 25 years. The first problem was getting comfortable. Writing by hand can be tedious physical work if you’re in a cramped position.
Out in the barn I found a piece of ¾-inch plywood, about 2 feet long and 14 inches wide. It fit nicely across the arms of one of our front-porch rocking chairs. Makes a near perfect writing surface.
Why haven’t I thought of this before? Working in a rocking chair, in gentle November sunshine, out here with the birds and the honeybees.
However, I had a terrible time getting started. This is my third attempt. My first few lines seemed foreign, as if somebody else wrote them. So I’d actually forgotten what my own handwriting looks like. It was a mess.
I tried to remember what I was taught about writing, way back in primary school. We were trained in something called penmanship.
This exposed us to a system of cursive writing called muscular movement. Which meant, near as I recall, that you wrote a word using not just your fingers and wrist but your entire arm. No, your entire shoulder, as well.
This always struck me as using an awful lot of meat and bones to produce a small word on a large piece of paper.
But apparently the system produced some beautiful penpersons. I was not among them, but my two elder sisters were. In school, they both did everything exactly right. It was hell, going through school behind two sisters who were perfect.
I bet by the time they were 80 years old, they could still do those penmanship exercises and never make a bobble.
One of the exercises we called push-me-pull-’ems. You were asked to make what looked like a fence — almost vertical lines, close together, all the way across a page, staying within the guides on your tablet paper. (A tablet was a pad of writing paper then, not a computer.)
The other required exercise was the whirly-gig. That’s what I called it anyway. You had to produce a complete line of connected circles. When done right, this exercise produced what resembled a Slinky, stretched all the way across a page.
Today I can’t do either of those exercises right. I just tried.
I suppose the nature and the quality of an adult’s handwriting reflects his/her life experience. I could produce readable script until my junior year in high school. Then I signed up for a course in shorthand because that’s where all the pretty girls were.
Next, in the Army, they tried to train me as a radio operator, and I learned to take Morse code messages, recorded in all capital letters.
Then came decades of hurried note-taking in my work. So I’ve ended up with a combination of Gregg Shorthand, Morse code, reporter’s hurry-up, and traces of muscular movement, which bothers me on damp days.
When my own kids started school, they were taught to print only. I thought that was a little strange.
Would they grow up to print love letters? But then everything about their world was strange to me.
My son is a left-hander. The last time he wrote a letter home, about 40 years ago, his script looked like a picket fence blown over by a hurricane. I had to get his little sister to translate it. She is a computer whiz, but I’ve never seen a sentence she wrote by hand.
All my grandkids do well in school. I wonder if they can write with a pencil.