One night as I lay abed preparing to go to sleep, something on the TV I left on triggered a memory in me. I started to visualize a pencil in my hand as it passed across a piece of paper, a page in an Indiana University “Blue Book.” I was carefully forming characters that became parts of a sentence. When I reached the end of the sentence, I lifted the pencil from the page and searched for the letters “T” and I.”
A group of grumpy people occasionally post a grievance on social media: “LIKE AND SHARE IF YOU THINK CURSIVE SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS!” I sigh when I see that sentiment. Few people in this country use pens and pencils to write anything to anyone any more. My friends and acquaintances are often surprised to get cards and letters from me, notes that I’ve penned in the all-caps form I was taught by an architect when I was young, a stilted and stylized form of writing that I did not fully adopt until a professor of English at Indiana University Southeast criticized my cursive hand.
I bailed out of a ten-year career as a small loan office manager and went to college. I had not done much writing in my job; I dictated memos to a clerk typist, proofed the result and had them sent to whomever was to get them. From 1965 to 1981 I sent few cards to people, wrote few letters. But after being exposed to English literature, I bought a typewriter and kept my first bride awake far into the night, slowly clacking away at the keys I needed to lift and strike through a carbon ribbon to leave an imprint on the sheet of paper pressed against the roller. This method was adequate for the purpose of submitting assignments, but when tests were given, students got a 12-page Blue Book. And I had to write with a pencil.
When I woke up from the dream of writing, I pulled from my night stand a Comparative Literature Blue Book from November 1981. Dr. Richard Brengle gave me an “A-” on my essay, a summary of the types of heroes in literature: the “Traditional,” the “Rebel,” the “Celebrity,” and the “Fictional.” He wrote in the inside cover, “Very good, Clement,” noting that my traditional hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that he felt was “truly a great moment of literature and conscience, equal … to anything of its kind ever written.” He left exclamatory expressions of agreement with many points, but I think I got an A- because I misspelled “jaunty,” and had a “dangling modifier.” Dr. Brengle was supportive and complimentary on all my Blue Books, until the time he wrote, “Clement – your strangled handwriting…” Stung, I immediately decided to employ the all-caps architectural lettering style of writing that I use these days, collecting rollerball and fountain pens and laboriously crafting for my relatives and friends, notes and letters of friendship and love.
Long ago, a sentence started in cursive with a fountain pen could not be interrupted to “cross the T’s and dot the I’s” until the hand had come to rest at the period, for to smear the words written would have been the equivalent of negating the thinking of the writer. But the editing of the writing that we do, and the lives we live, is the modern equivalent of crossing T’s and dotting I’s.
Review the life we’ve lived, show grace and gratitude, care and concern, and cross those T’s, dot those I’s.
cjon3acd@att.net