I wrote a note to a new friend and when next I saw her, she commented on something that was in it.
“What does ‘his mark’ mean,” she asked. “You put it next to your signature.”
My signature is as neat and readable to most people as Sanskrit. I have a signing ritual, which was identified by a long-ago co-worker: my hand hovers above the sheet for a second as I do a false pass, then drops down onto the paper with a furious scrabbling. I sign in cursed cursive, but all lowercase, and with a cutesy “o” above the lowercase “j.” (I learned this “cutesy o” trick from my father, who signed his name with the cutesy o. My grade school teachers banned it, but I continued to nurture the habit in secret.) But I sign short notes and personal letters with just my two initials: “Cj.”
I learned from someone or some source, somewhere, that illiterate men used to sign contracts with an “X.” A witness would attest that he saw the person sign the document and next to the “X” would write, “this is his mark.” I don’t know when I started to identify my “mark,” but I do this now for people who have not previously seen my handwriting.
When I was a so-called “adult” student at Indiana University Southeast, I was required to submit essays, and those essays were to be in something called a “blue book.” It was called this, in part, because it was blue, but mainly because it was blue. I was excited about being in an academic environment and eager to emulate all the behaviors of the college student: hanging at the commons, shooting pool and writing in cursive. I had spent a large clot of years dictating letters to secretaries, so my writing had mostly been applied to the signing of my name on letters to debtors.
The first blue book essay I submitted was to a professor of English, who spanked my grade downward because of what he called my “strangled handwriting.” I was disappointed: I had worked hard to claw those letters into those “cursive” shapes. I was also pleased that he could read any of it, since I could not. Once the curls came from my pencil, they were as undecipherable to me as ancient hieroglyphics. (I wrote with a pencil, or more specifically, a Pentel P205 mechanical pencil.) From that moment on, and even unto today, I wrote in all caps. This habit has gotten me into no trouble whatsoever, and no one has said that they cannot read what I have handwritten.
When I moved to Indianapolis in 1986, I left a friend in Southern Indiana, and I would write to her. I wrote of things that I saw, touched, felt and believed and things deep, shallow and silly. I just wrote. And because I like to feel stuff — the resistance of the paper to the pen pressed into it, dragging behind it the tail of black ink — I wrote on paper, with pen.
Indiana Senators Jean Leising of Oldenburg and Mike Delph of Carmel want to mandate the teaching of “New American Cursive” in Indiana’s public schools. They refuse to accept that the world has changed and new technology has sucked the oxygen from cursive, and it is a dying art form. But if they manage to cram the idea into the schools, I would hope that students would learn to communicate in a more personal way: by writing. It will not matter to the recipient of the note that it was not written in the cursed cursive.