Scribble Me This

I wrote a letter this morning.  No, not an email - an actual letter, on paper, with a pen.  My right hand is hurling insults at me for taxing long forgotten muscle fibers to scribe squiggly curly-queues across a blank sheet, but my mind loves how the sentences flow into the ink and onto the paper, effortlessly, elegantly, with a sweet scribbling sound - not the disjointed tappity-tap of uncertain keystrokes that are so easily mislaid and corrected.  Keyboard typing allows the brain to be much more impetuous and less disciplined.  Writing in cursive requires forethought and commitment to both structure and vocabulary.

Do they even teach cursive writing anymore?  Or are kids given instruction in proper thumb typing technique?  I don't recall the mechanics of learning most of the things that I have been taught, but I distinctly recall any subject with which I struggled (and by struggled, I mean I did not receive effusive praise).  My cursive writing was a struggle, and the feedback was most discouraging.  To this day, I cringe with shame each time I attempt to form the little hump between an o and an n or an m, and my lower case r's are always missing their horn.  Upper case K causes me great stress and I still have to pause to decide which direction to make the loop before each g, p, and q.

I recall just how modern I felt when I signed up for a typing class in Junior High School that used electric typewriters with built-in correction tape (which we weren't allowed to use.)  My typing was only marginally better than my cursive, but more than training my fingers, typing without the ability to edit on the fly trained my mind to form complete thoughts in advance of expressing them.  Unfortunately, this lesson remained ensconced in the neural clusters that control my fingers and did not bleed over into the portions of the brain responsible for speech - which still comes out raw and unedited.

My instinct is to feel nostalgic melancholy over the demise of cursive writing and typewriters, as if some elegant social more were being discarded willy-nilly.  As my mind tumble-dries the pros and cons of various methods of communication, some notion inevitably falls into a sentence that begins with "Kids these days..." and normally, I am happy press that idea into the creases.  I like to imagine a little scene, in which my grandchildren see me writing a letter.  They ooh and ahh over my cryptic alphabet and ask me to teach them the secret code, so they can have something to lord over their classmates who use voice recognition to write their essays in a stream of consciousness, only no one writes essays anymore, because expressing a supported opinion might offend someone. The modern essay is only 160 characters long.

Only, I don't have any children, so it is pretty unlikely that I will have any grandchildren, and even less likely that they would catch me writing a letter, because I would probably be teaching them to play Space Invaders...on my Xbox360.