I have a love/hate relationship with a pen. Not so much with a pencil, pencils come with erasers on top, so you can quickly do away with an error with a few vigorous rubs on your paper, try to keep your paper intact, rubbing to hard does produces holes in ones foolscap. Pens are different story, you can't erase pens. I know in this day and age you can go out and buy fancy shamcy erasable pens but from what I've seen, you can still see the error. And I don't like the ink in those pens, it's weird ink, doesn't flow as nice it gets kinda gloppy and smeary when you accidentally glide your hand through it.. I know there's white out you can buy to "paint" over your mistake, put everyone knows the mistake is there because white out isn't the same white as your piece of paper. And then there's the white out tape, which just bugs me, or maybe I don't work it right, but I usually end up covering too little of the mistake or covering too much of the mistake and end up with letters just sort of hanging about in a sentence. When I find a great pen, and what I mean when I say a "great pen", I like the way it feels in my hand, a fine point, not to thin, not too thick, the ink runs nicely, doesn't glomp out leaving gobs of ink on your paper, doesn't leak and leave ink all over hands, and then you take so much time trying to figure where this ink is leaking from and by that point your piece of paper is a mess so you crumple it up and look for a pencil. When I find that great pen, and when I want to use that great pen, chances are, highly likely, that someone with the initial "C" who lives in my house, has taken that pen to school because she can't find her big box pens that she bought at the beginning of the school year in her messy room and so she leaves me with the crappy pens that won't produce ink or skip ink along the paper.
All that being said........It's Go Time!!!
I learned how to cursvise write in Grade 4. with pencil, with an eraser on top. The day that we learned how to write a capital letter"I" in handwriting was the day that I was absent from school. I can remember where I was too, at the eye doctor, getting fitted for my over sized, pastel coloured, googly, upside down armed glasses to help me see the chalkboard better. I missed the whole lesson on how to write a proper capital letter "I" so when I returned school a short while later, everyone in my class was happily writing capital letter "I" the proper way.
The school that I attended was a little rinky dink country school that put penmanship in high regard. If you had great penmanship, you were going places. With this all being said, I figured out on my own how to write a capital letter "I". I did ask the teacher for help, and she did show me but I wasn't too keen on her way. I liked my way better. Her way was to start with the big loop and swoop over to the tail. I showed her my way. My way was to start with the tail, and end with the loop. Backwards. That's when my teacher asked me to write out a sentence for her. That's when I ended up with a "corrective red rubber triangle shaped put on my pencil" thingy mabobber. Apparently I held my pencil wrong, and this corrective device was going to guide me along the path of perfect penmanship.
WRONG!!!!
Let's fast track through a few years. My rinky dink school was big on doling out "lines" as punishment. I have done my fair share of lines. "I will not forget my homework" was one. "I shall not talk" was another. "I shall not talk back" was another goodie. Those were the main ones I received and please write out one hundred times! As you got up in grades, writing dictionary pages and long passages out of the bible were favourite punishments for teachers.
I like to think that this is why my penmanship suffered. I just wanted to write my lines out quick and get them over and done with. I didn't care what my lines looked like, I wrote them out on the bus on my home. I wrote them in bed, late at night with a flashlight clamped between my teeth so my parents wouldn't find out that I had lines.....AGAIN!! I wrote them on the way to school on the bus with friends helping so my teacher wouldn't dole out a hundred more because I had forgot to do them. I got good at doing lines. I still forgot my homework, I still talked, and I still talked back. Can you tell? Those lines did me a lot of good.
Then one day, a whole bunch of us got lines. Usually, there was a small select group that received lines and I was in that select group. But this time, people who never got lines, got lines. One girl, in my class, who never got lines, got lines too. When she handed in her lines, with all us regular "writers of lines, my teacher held her piece of paper with one hundred perfectly written penmanship lines up the wazoooo, and went on and on how he had never seen a punishment written out so beautifully. He went so far as to pass it around the class for all of us to see, I believe it was even thumb tacked to the bulletin board as a lesson for us regular line writers. Clearly this girl had not written her lines on the bus.
Penmanship was making me angry. The little rubber thingy on the end of my pen certainly had not worked for me. We kids were writing things out all the time and being marked on penmanship, and there was a few us that were being scored all time lows on the cursive scale. I never thought that was fair, some were just more gifted in the art of using a pen, but I never voiced it, I would have ended up with lines again.
One of our Grade eight teachers had the brilliant idea to hold penmanship writing contests for each grade. And each winner would have their piece thumb tacked to the big bulletin board in the library. An hour, one afternoon, for a few weeks we wrote out poems on pieces of foolscap. Never once did my work appear thumb tacked to the centre of the board, it did get thumb tacked, but it sat on the outskirts on the outside looking in.
A buddy of mine, and I, well, we had had enough. Our fingers hurt from clenching our pens tight trying our best to coax out flowing and twirly letters. We revolted, held a mutiny, we schemed and devised our plan. When the next poem was handed out for us to copy, we set to it. Every week poems came to us in photocopied, handwritten form and from this we had to transpire our own cursive art. My buddy and I we cheated. We traced. We took our foolscap, placed it over our own teacher's handwriting and traced her letters. We were sure we were going to win that penmanship contest that week. We were willing to bet the farm on it. But alas, cheaters never prosper and neither did we and our traced work was regulated back to sides of the bulletin board. We didn't make centre stage.
As much as my dad thinks that I have missed my calling as an auctioneer, I think I have missed my calling as a doctor. I could have been a great doctor with my indiscernible handwriting skills. I could just skip the medicine part and go straight to writing out "scripts" for patients.
It was my highschooler C that brought my attention back to my penmanship skills. She needed notes for missed classes, stating where her where abouts were that day. I quickly wrote in cursive, a note. C took one look at her note and asked what it said. It was the usual, "C was not in class that day because blah, blah, blah...." note. I wrote another note and took my time with it. It started out neat, but by the end, it was a scrawly mess. I read it to her again, and she took off to school.
"Mom, I had to read your note. Out loud. The secretary took one look at it, and gave it back to me to read to her. Maybe you should just print things."
Christmas card season will soon be upon us. I will receive in my mail cards that will be handwritten, not all beautiful, but they will be legible. Some will be hand printed, some will be written loopy and on a slant. Some will be handwritten in twirls, swirls with swoopy swoops, so fancy that it will be a hard to read who it comes from. Each card that reaches my home, whether it's a penmanship mess or a proper penmanship work of art, each card will find a place thumb tacked to the centre of my bulletin board because in my house penmanship doesn't count!
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