The Moving Finger Writes

The title of today’s essay comes from a poem by Omar Khayyám:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

My wife's beautiful handwriting was one of the many things that first captivated me. It helped me to fall in love with her. Notes she wrote to me early in our romance I still admire, not least for their sentiments but also for how gorgeously they swept across the page. I envied the effortless grace of her script and the elegant efficiency of her printing. Her teachers might have taught her well, or maybe she was one of those students who easily emulated the daily cursive practices, but whatever the reason, one thing is true: I will never be able to write like she can.

My handwriting is—to borrow the term that four subsequent elementary school teachers wrote on my report cards—atrocious. When I first brandished writing implements in Ms. Dierwechter’s kindergarten class, I could see that the middle-aged spinster was less than effervescent about my work. In kindergarten, in the early 1980s, no handwriting was on the curriculum. We used chunks of fat crayon to trace big letters (one per page) that had been cranked out from a Xerox mimeograph machine, and we spread white paste (some of my classmates ate it) on fibrous construction paper and that was about it.

The girls in my class, among them Stacia Logan and Kasey Heisman (both of whom were the offspring of teachers) could already tie their sneakers and write their names and print numbers up to 10 when school opened that Autumn. Ms. Dierwechter burbled and crooned over their work. She squawked and honked at the rest of us, craning her long neck and casting a beady black eye on our pages with barely contained derision. I sensed her dislike early in the year when she ignored me despite raising my hand. In response, I deliberately ignored her when called on, and our relationship developed some dudgeon henceforth.

At age five, I was a doodler, swirling the chunk of broken crayon on the page and humming to myself, with complete disregard—or, more likely, just blissfully ignorant—of the rules. When the scolding remarks from Ms. Dierwechter didn't swing me back in line with her perfect pet students, my mother got a note sent home safety pinned on my jacket. “David talks too much, doesn't pay attention, and has poor penmanship.” By the end of the year, ‘poor’ became ‘atrocious’. 

Not much has changed.

By first grade, of course, I was settling down a bit, and becoming more solidly talkative, distracted and hyperactive. I was never deliberately disobedient, but I think sometimes I couldn’t sit still. It didn’t help that my house was visible across the valley from the windows of our classrooms and so, I was often lost in reveries and missed teacher instructions. So, imagine if you can, a tall-for-his-age blonde kid with a beaming smile, dressed in patched hand-me-downs, rambling on about some cartoon or other, humming a lively tune and not being able to trace a D. This, in essence, was my "portrait of the artist as a young man," with respect to James Joyce.

The lovely and mother-like Mrs. Cave was far more generous of spirit than my kindergarten teacher who had been more than a little the basis for my fear and loathing of any anserine birds. My friend Shannon Drum once said in awed tones, “Mrs. Cave reminds me of Momma.” Shannon's mother was four hundred pounds of stout farmer’s wife stuffed into shabby men's overalls, work boots and a whip-like braid down her wide back, but I knew what he meant. Mrs. Cave was a sweetheart and we all loved her. Her patience was endless and her kindness was sincere. Later in my life, I realized that she bore more than a passing resemblance to Barbara Eden.

However, even this saint of a teacher had her fill with me by the end of the first quarter. Once again, I was sent home with a note pinned to my jacket, “David talks too much, is distracted, and has poor penmanship.” She added, perhaps aware of the harshness of her statement, “He is a very bright boy and very curious. He loves learning and is a careful reader.” Later, just like the year before, my final report card had the word ‘atrocious’ written behind the line for penmanship. 

Over the next few years, we moved from learning how to print letters to writing cursive. Above the blackboard in every classroom was a line of laminated cards that showed each cursive letter and had little directional arrows showing how one ought to direct their pencil to accomplish it. This throwback to a Victorian style called The Palmer Method—and the reason that all the adults in my family wrote the same way—appealed to me. There was no need to pick up the point of the pencil from the page. I could write three words in the space of time it took to print just a few letters. I liked writing in cursive. It felt strangely historical and it suited my limited patience.

Around this same time, my young imagination had already taken its first steps into a lifelong trek into history. I was fascinated with our forebears. Television, cinematic and literary examples of frontier life that happened right where I grew up were very much on my mind. One Christmas or birthday, someone gave me the gift of a bottle of ink, a quill pen and a sheaf of parchment paper and I immediately started researching how to write in an archaic way at our tiny local library. By the time I was making my first forays into the upper grades of elementary school, I was still getting unsatisfactory in talking and paying attention, was excelling at reading, but was still drawing negative comments from the teachers about writing.

My historical cursive writing deviated significantly from the school's prescribed style, causing friction with my teachers. I was impatient with the primary school pace. Teachers back then did not put any faith into ‘self-taught’. When it came time for me to write “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in cursive, I did it but it looked more as if it had been written by Alexander Hamilton than a studious elementary school student. Mrs. Hower (2nd Grade) had a parent conference, where she scolded my mother for not forcing me to adopt the curricular style. She had no truck with my attempts and she made it perfectly clear. 

This woman, who was built on the lines of a naval mine, had a snappish and abrasive manner. When she laid into my writing, my mother stopped her flat. I can still proudly remember her getting a bit red and telling the teacher that she was proud her son had taught himself to write cursive. Later, she did ask me over an ice cream cone to try to write a little more like what they were doing in class, just to stay off the teacher’s radar. I tacitly agreed, but I never stopped writing like Hamilton and Thomas Paine.

If Mrs. Hower was coarse and crotchety, when I matriculated to third grade, Mrs. Sechrest was pleasantly oblivious, which suited my learning style beautifully. She was pregnant with her third child during my third-grade year, and her pregnancy understandably distracted her from her teaching duties. We spent most of the year listening to calming piano music on a boombox on her desk and reading or coloring and going to lunch and recess. Except for Matt Mock doing his best impression of a possum in the front of the room, it was a quiet and delightfully easy year. Or would have been. In the last quarter, Mrs. Sechrest departed to have her child and the substitute who took over disrupted the zen-like calm of that classroom like a V-1 buzz bomb.

In the film The Great Escape, the prisoners' relentless escape attempts eventually lead to the replacement of the camp's commandant with the brutal Oberst Werner Braune, who favored swift and decisive action, even if it meant resorting to lethal force—usually a machine gun. The long-term substitute, Mrs. Braune, was as bad as her namesake in the movie but without all the whimsey. She hated children and teaching and gave everyone sour remarks on their report cards. Even the usually favored teacher’s pet girls, Stacia and Kasey, were reduced to tears when they tried to win the sub’s favor. Several parents came together and bombarded the principal with threats to go to the superintendent if she wasn’t replaced, but by the time anything could be done, the year was over and we staggered out of her class like freed P.O.W.s. Rumors began to circulate that while cleaning the school that summer, the janitorial staff found a cleverly concealed excavation in the coat closet at the back of the room, that tunneled into the girl’s restroom. I wasn’t surprised.

My fourth-grade year was a contentious one, again, but that was because one of my best childhood friend’s mother taught the class. Mrs. Bill did not like me or that I was friends with her son. She spent most of the year arguing with me about things I had already learned at the library. I don’t remember what my grades were, but I remember she didn’t like my writing, either. However, since she also attended our family church, I think more than once, she pulled my mother aside and told her that I was on my way to the life of a heathen or convict. I’m not sure if my mother believed her, but by then, she was also distracted with other things. Years later, as a high schooler, I visited my friend at his house and took every opportunity to leave kind thank you notes in illegible script for his mother.

Mr. Grubbs was a too-tan doppelganger of Richard M. Nixon and was the only male teacher in the whole school, taught fifth grade. He had a strange preference for velour sweaters and brown polyester trousers. He surprisingly used my unique writing as a positive example for my classmates, encouraging them to develop their own individual penmanship. His pedagogical style was based on the idea that by fifth grade, instead of little cookie-cutter kids, we ought to be developing our individuality. This got me bullied and into trouble with the principal for “fighting”. Tony Leopold and Luke Loeb pinned me down in the mulch at recess and pulled my shirt up to give me a “cherry belly”. I flailed out at them to get away and made contact with both of them, leaving bruises. Although it was the only year in my career where I didn’t get bad notice for my handwriting, I had other problems that cast a pall on my grades and scholarly career in general.

After this, too, I was far less interested in proving my handwriting skills or drawing unwanted attention to myself. In the coming years, educational focus shifted to typing, computers, and word processing. By my first year of college, everyone had an email address and many of us were already communicating via online chat platforms. 

I can and occasionally do still write in cursive, but my scrawl is worse than chicken scratch, now. For the previous generations who only had pen and ink, it was necessary to at least try to be legible. Once typing took over and morphed into texting, which required a QWERTY keyboard and active thumbs, handwriting went the way of cuneiform and papyrus. Sometime in the new century, cursive fell out of the curriculum and most young people today cannot “sign” their name, but they usually don’t have to.

I am not one of those “old people” who laments this fact. I recently had a training where the instructor said that, because children are always on their phones, soon all kids will be nonverbal. This is the next stage in the evolution of the ludicrous idea that, if kids cannot write in cursive, they will be illiterate. It is born of an inability to see that as technology changes, so do our ways of communicating. Anyone who gets a handwritten letter from me will be glad that I can type faster than I can scribble and will breathe a sigh of relief that I have chosen to hunt and peck out a note to them, rather than sending them an indecipherable message in impenetrable scrawl. 

And while it is lovely to get a handwritten letter from someone, the process of typing is not much different. Although there is some science to prove that handwriting wakes up much more of the brain than typing does, I believe (for now) that script and typing are no different than reading a book or listening to it being read. They essentially awaken the same parts of the brain and constitute ‘reading’. If you type a letter, it has still been written and the parts of the brain necessary to transcribe ideas from the imagination to the page are still activated. Only the hand gestures necessary to get it there are different.

I’m not sure if any of my former teachers are still walking the earth, but if they are, they will be happy to know that at least one of their former charges is still writing letters occasionally to his long-suffering good aunt, but that his handwriting is still ‘atrocious’. It hasn’t prevented me from being literate or from finding success in my professional career. So, despite all they tried to instill in me, learning how to teach myself to write did me no harm and I hold the same to be true, today. Kids don’t have to learn cursive to learn how to express themselves. All they need is encouragement and modeled behavior and not regressive ideas about what will happen if they cannot write, or if they teach themselves.