Ode to the Lost Art of the Curse (er...-ive)

Today, January 23, is "National Handwriting Day." I know this because each day I start my morning by posting something like this on my Facebook page: it's either a celebration of the day, something that happened in history this day or sometimes a combination of both. And then I go research and investigate it before posting. Yes, I'm just that much of a geek. I guess it's the "teacher" in me, wanting to educate in some small way.

So I started with this today (and the photo above):

"Your handwriting is an excellent method of identifying you or your documents, as well as conveying feeling and personality in your work. Unfortunately, in today's super busy world, for most people the act of writing is slower than the act of keyboarding, so it's slowly becoming obsolete.

I say: let's not lose the ability to communicate more personally! Computers are great, but the act of learning to write plays a special part in the development of young brains, and is a great way to convey warmth and a personal touch to the recipient of your message.

Today is National Handwriting Day. How about we celebrate with a handwritten note or card to someone?"

And my friends, as always, commented brilliantly on it to help me think even more about it than I had just then. I guess they educated me, too. (I have some pretty darned good friends.) And as I wondered what to write about today, I knew this was it.

I understand that times change and technology is often the focus of that change. And technology IS good. Hey, I adapt to most of it pretty quickly and easily, even if not immediately. I embrace it even. But sometimes technology is not always a good thing. Families gathering around a radio to listen to programs and talk about them together in front of a roaring fireplace turned into families sitting in front of the TV instead, eating off TV trays with parents telling junior to "move your head and quiet down" because they couldn't see or hear the box. Do I want to go back to the day of no television? Heck no. I love my TV. But can I reminisce about a time that wasn't even a part of my life and imagine how specially unique and now completely lost it probably is? Yes.

And that brings us back to the cursive handwriting.

It's quickly becoming a lost art; and I do mean art. Each of us who grew up with sharp #2 pencils in hand and that tell-tale paper in front of us were taught to do our lettering the exact same way. Oh, and that paper! With its series of strong dark lines and softer dashed ones half between! You knew your lower cases had better meet the dash our you'd get points off your penmanship grade. You knew the letters with "tails" had to come down a certain distance below the solid, oh! but not far enough to affect the letters in the next line! And you knew darn well those i's and t's better be dotted and crossed absolutely correctly. It was a skill, folks. An art they were teaching us.

And, yet, a few years later it was OK to make that strict cursive writing into something of your very own. You may have still done the capital Z properly or enjoyed doing the little "hooks" on the big S and F....but no one ever stuck to "the Q as a 2." (Am I right?) Everyone who learned cursive handwriting the exact same way also somehow then adopted it to their own style, too, and it was allowed. It's like folks speaking the same language but adding their own dialect. We all learned the same words; we just pronounce them differently...but still could understand each other.

Which we can do in a typed word, of course. But where's the personality in that? The thing is: the understanding is important, sure. But the *personality* was just as important. You can put in writing a personality that you can't do with a keyboard. Sure, you can pick different fonts to try to illustrate it (there's a comic sans joke in here somewhere), but it's not the same.

Within the past year I came across my old journals from college and I was both amazed and tickled to see my own handwriting from 20 years ago: what had changed, what was the same. It was interesting to pull out book after book and see my moods and dreams and emotions just by how I formed the letters: big and loopy, small and slanted, no matter what words I was even reading. I think I would still appreciate my old journals today if they had been typed, but there's something much more intimate in reading them in the art form of the letters that really were what brought those words initially to life.

I heard today that this art is dying. I think I already knew it, but the comments from my friends solidified it. Many schools are not even teaching it anymore because it's becoming "antiquated" and folks now type faster than they can write. It makes me sad, even as I embrace this fact: afterall, I'm typing this blog instead of writing it, yes?

But as I said in my Facebook entry, it got me to thinking. Thinking about, say, folks a few decades from now, coming across their great-great-great-great-grandfather's WWI letters back home to his beloved, all ribboned and boxed carefully up in an attic somewhere that no one ever knew about and not being able to curl up on the couch and read them without a translator two generations older there because they *can't read cursive* on their own.

[On an aside that illustrates this? On my last trip home, I found some of these same sort of letters my Dad wrote to my Mom even before they were married. Oh! To see my now-passed father's handwriting! And in sweet correspondence with my Mom! Oh, you cannot get the feelings I had as I read them in a typed-up, printed-out letter, folks. You just can't.]

So, yeah. I get it; I do. I think the only thing to which I can relate it for my own generation is the lost skill of shorthand now. I know Mama knows how to do it. I'm sure some of you may even. But when I was in school, it was no longer taught; there was no need for shorthand anymore with new developments that let you record or click keys or whatever else faster than that. I now wonder if anyone felt the same way about the death of shorthand as I do now about the death of the cursive hand?

And so I will keep writing, friends. I'll keep typing to you all here, of course, but I'll also keep writing my letters, postcards and journals. It can only "go away" if we let it go away. I think it's an art form worth cherishing. If it has to pass, it does. But I, for one, will be hoping for a slow and peaceful death.

I'm boiling eggs. Just because I CAN.

When I moved into my cute little apartment last May I was warned by a friend and wicked close neighbor "gas here? expensive!" It's the deregulation of this utility about 10 years ago in the ATL that did this. It was supposed to help folks: give us a choice who we wanted to provide our gas service based on pricing, right? Yeah, unfortunately, the *piping system* is still owned by one and only company. And so gas prices took the opposite turn: they're redonks.

The only thing in my glorious little apartment that needs gas is my stove/oven (heat is: but it's radiator gas controlled and included in rent). I'm not sure what's the difference between a stove and an oven. Is the stove the top and the oven the inside? Either way, it's gas. And either way, it would cost me $40 a month just to have a line in, even if I never used it. So either way? It's now just a storage unit; extra shelf space.

Now, folks. Contrary to popular belief, I like to cook. I do! I just don't often cook just for myself because, well, it's just myself. But I do like to cook. But I also do not like to pay that fee every month PLUS whatever gas I use on top of it when it just seems outrageous to me. So, being me, I got creative.

Convection ovens? Oh yeah, that does casseroles, pizzas, anything the "oven" would do. So I bought me one. Soups and stuff? Microwave. Had that. Stews and chili? Nice big crock pot. Had that, too. But the one thing that I missed -- that I couldn't do in ANY of that?

Hard boiled eggs.

Dammit!

Oh, I do so love me a good hard boiled egg. Add the devil to that and I could eat them up like there's no tomorrow.

So, finally, after all this time (8 months and 10 days, to be exact), I finally got myself one of them little coil burner things this Christmas. You know, the ones that were "illegal" in your college dorms? And Mama sent me home with two pots I still remember her using when I was just a youngster.

So I'm making a batch of hard boiled eggs now.

Because I CAN.

Oh, it's SO game on come Easter!

O Tannenbaum: to my dear Aunt Angie

My parents did the best thing ever for me when they got married: they moved out of the little Pennsylvania town Mom grew up in and settled in Milwaukee instead. Not sure if it was by conscious choice or because of the fact that in the mid-60s, a woman followed her husband as opposed to a man following his bride.

Now, I don't think anything is wrong with that town. I love that place. My family is still from there and around there and I am blessed to have my roots there. I'd be proud to say I was from there. But I'm not. And this is not about that. This is about my surrogate aunt.

"Aunt Angie" was one of my Dad's best friend's wife: they lived right down the hill and across the street from our home growing up. Aunt Angie and Uncle Les were not related by blood, but they were still my aunt and uncle. At that time in the 70s, in the Midwest? Their proper titles: Mr. and Mrs. Ermis? Was too formal. Because they were family, after all. So instead of calling them by that, Mom and Dad told us they were our Aunt and Uncle. Angie and Les were then and will always be my aunt and uncle, and mean as much to me as those who are by bloodlines.

I learned just a few minutes ago now from Uncle Les in an email that Aunt Angie passed away yesterday. It's a blessing and she's in peace now. I just got off the phone with Mom to make sure she knew too; she did. And it got me to thinking about how my "Aunt Angie" was such an amazing, loving substitute for the ones I had living 800 miles away I rarely got to see. She didn't ever try to take the place of them; she just filled the need I didn't have because of geography.

Angie was German-American and spoke in an accent and language sometimes my siblings and I would giggle about respectfully. She could not pronounce my Mom's name, for example: "Dorothy" sounded like "Dordy." We'd decorate cakes for my Mom reading "Happy birthday, Dordy!" and Angie would laugh over it, knowing we weren't mocking her but almost lovingly including her in something silly to laugh about.

I still remember one time when I was in second grade and the church wanted us to learn how to sing "O Christmas Tree" in German. Why? I have no idea. But Mama reminded me then that Aunt Angie was German and so for weeks I went down the hill, across the street and she taught me how to sing "O Tannenbaum" in her language. After weeks of practice, I was so proud to know I could go into our Christmas pageant and actually sing the entire darn song in German.

Unfortunately, no one else bothered to learn it. And I was afraid to sing it on my own. Um, I was in second grade, afterall.

But? I can still sing it now. :-) I took Spanish for 5+ years and can't even speak that as well as I can sing this German song. Because of Aunt Angie.

And I'm going to sing it tonight, whether out loud or in my head...or both. I'm blessed in a million ways to have known her and thank my parents for giving me that. I wonder sometimes still if Mom feels guilty about having to distance me from my biological aunts and uncles because she moved 800 miles away to be with Dad to provide me a better life. I hope she knows, no matter what, that she gave me a huge huge blessing in her sacrifice to allow me to have Aunt Angie in my life too. Rest in peace, my dear, dear Aunt. I look forward to seeing you again someday.

Welcome, Mat. Happy you're in a *secured building.* :-)

We were young. Silly. Stupid. Obnoxious even.

I was 19 and she was 17 when we met; she turned 18 a month later and I turned 20 a month after that. We happened to meet on accident/coincidence/divine intervention that summer. From two different worlds we came: I was a college student who grew up three hours away. She was from Stevens Point, a new graduate from high school. We answered the same ad in a newspaper (back then, in 1991, it was newspapers, not Craigslist, kids) to share a broke-down house for the summer for $250. Not a month; the entire summer. It was 1991, afterall.

We were underaged but we still drank (gasp!) -- I know, right? Harlots! And we'd walk from our brokedown palace on Union Street in Stevens Point out to the Square with $2 in our pockets, knowing we could get boys to buy us drinks. And after, with sweet little kisses on their cheeks (not so much harlots afterall!), we'd stumble home through the back of the Shopko parking lot since we were always too smart to drive drunk. And, well, we didn't have cars.

On the way, we somehow fixated on folks' welcome mats. Don't know why, don't know how. But it was a college town and we knew the difference between the locals and the college students who got the crappy ones for free. So our game (to keep us awake? sober? vertical until we got home and crawled through the window?*) was to "take" someone's welcome mat...and then switch it with someone else's. We never really stole one in that sense (er... Bartles & James sense anyway. Remember: it was 1991!)... everyone who had one at their door the night before still woke up with one again. Just maybe a different one.

And so when she gifted me with this one this Christmas? Oh, hells yes, it's incredibly awesome. It's a little fox saying hello. But it's also a throwback to the summer we met: two girls on paper who had nothing in common and had no reason to ever meet. Except by accident. Or coincidence. Or, as I really believe, divine intervention. :-)

Love you, my Sue!

*story for another day *grin*