Category: Writing A Book-ish

Shite Sandwiches

“There is no love in your family.” The Turkish-born psychiatrist summarized my lived experience in a single sentence. I just didn’t know it yet.

It was both earth-shaking and yet felt a little nefarious. “No love?” I wondered wordlessly. “In MY family?” “Is that really what he said?”

I hashed that one line over and over in my head for years.

When the psychiatrist said that simple, explosive line during our biweekly session, I honestly had no idea what he meant. “No love?” “In MY family?” “But, but?” It somehow felt like someone pouring ice-cold mineral oil down my spine through the back of my shirt. I wasn’t sure what I was really feeling but I knew the feeling was foreign and confusing and cold. Ice cold.

I once saw a woman psychologist on the Canadian West Coast. I remember her well-groomed spotlessly clean white West Highland Terrier. I remember she had a long, beautiful green leather couch in her drawing room. I was envious of her beautiful living room and dapper dog.

She listened to my story with keen attention. I trotted out the “no love in my family” story. “A Turkish psychiatrist I once saw,” I told her, “said there was no love in my family. No love? Imagine that? My parents and siblings tell each other we love each other all the time!”

I was slightly frustrated and reluctant to let go of the fantasy that mine had been a happy, wonderful childhood. That I came away from it hurt and confused and beset by dark and difficult feelings was on me. Something was wrong with me. Because they loved me. They told me so all the time.

At one point, the kindly West Coast psychologist looked up from her notebook with reading glasses perched stereotypically on the end of her nose: “Your confusion is understandable,” she said. “If someone feeds you shit sandwiches all your life and tells you they are feeding you steak, you are bound to be confused.”

First, “No love in my family?” Now this. Shit sandwiches that were supposed to stand in for steak? Psychotherapy was nothing else if not extremely confusing and full of strange utterings.

It took many years to realize what these sage advisors actually meant. With time, their insights eventually touched and deeply impacted me. It was true that my childhood was filled with neglect and abuse – sexual, emotional, and psychological. But no one “wanted” to hurt us, I believed.

Caregivers so utterly wrapped up in their own personal problems who have unresolved trauma holding the reins of their own behaviors and being don’t necessarily realize what harm they are doing. Not to themselves and much less to others.

Parents who are intelligent enough to realize these deficits are bad things for a child want very much to cover them up. Or more likely, they are inclined to act as if they are not important. “That’s life,” I often heard my mother say. Along with, “Hand me that bottle of pills from beside my bed, will you sweetie?”

At other times, her head hung limply into the toilet bowl, Mom would retch thick black-green liquid that smelled terrible. She would quickly cover: “It’s only bile, dear. I’m throwing up bile because there’s nothing else in my stomach.” If there was medical import in that statement, it was lost on me as a ten-year-old.

Seeing my mother’s head in the toilet and knowing she was “sick” again was familiar and made more sense. Fluffernutters for supper again tonight.

A Man Called Otto

Tom Hanks as a crabby old man? Whoddathunkit?

We frequently register ourselves as getting older by watching others. It is both a kindness and a shock to see people you grew up watching suddenly inhabiting roles that you imagined only your parents’ peers could fill.

I remember Tom Hanks in Big. His big film debut was back in 1988. He played a goofy kid with a sweet manner and exposed a big talent.

Hanks has proved his mettle over the years in many delightful and provocative roles. Hanks has chosen his projects well. He has mostly played the good guy in the movie roles he has starred in.

He didn’t shy away from challenging roles either. As Captain Phillips, Hanks skilfully played the role of managing a pirate takeover of his craft and everyone was safely delivered.

The enduring genius of Forrest Gump comes to mind, too. He played the role of an intellectually challenged young man to perfection. The Academy agreed with me. Forrest Gump won eight Oscars including as the Best Actor in a Leading Role for Hanks.

Tom Hanks movies seem ubiquitous. In Castaway, he carried a whole film with only a soccer ball as a co-star. In Catch Me if You Can, he played a tenacious FBI agent in hot pursuit of young conman Frank Abagnale, memorably played by Leonardo Dicaprio.

Other roles Hanks played have stuck in my memory. Saving Private Ryan. The Green Mile. His performance with Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies was pure onscreen alchemy.

Clint Eastwood is older now, too. Gone is the tough-talking police inspector of Dirty Harry fame. He now plays the crusty but caring curmudgeon to perfection in a slew of age-appropriate roles.

I watch them all aging. I realize that I am aging right along with them. Tom Hanks is the boyfriend/husband I never had. Clint Eastwood might have been a great-uncle had we lived in California and had anything at all to do with the film industry.

And then there is the recent “old Dad” phenomenon with icons Bob DeNiro and Al Pacino fathering children in their eighties. It seems they are as productive in their dotage as they were in their film careers. How did they get so old so fast?

There is one important throughline to see in watching these men from afar. They keep going. They have done and do good work. They have dignity and accomplishments. And, in a couple of cases, they have diaper duty.

Every role these giants take on is like seeing them anew and reflects the talent that landed them where they are in life. It is also a reminder that time is passing for them just like me and my peers.

A Man Called Otto tells the tale of a man determined to die by his own hand after his beloved wife dies. But new neighbors and the insistence of life keep hauling him back into the present and offer him new reasons for living.

The message in this bittersweet film seems to be that even though we may lose important things in our life – even our dearest loved ones – life still goes on and still calls to us. Love is always available out there in the world.

If we but look and listen…

Imploding

I both love and hate confrontation.

I love it because I am standing up for myself.

I hate it because it makes me feel uncomfortable things I don’t normally feel and don’t want to feel. It is an area of life in which I require considerably more finessing.

I am accustomed to deceit and trickery in social relations, and most frequently in family relations. Whether members of my family practiced deceit and trickery deliberately is almost beside the point. I remember the sickening sloshing about of unwelcome emotions in me as I stumbled upon one sad realization after another.

In many confrontations, I always hold out hope that I am about to discover someone made an “honest mistake.” For this mistake, they would rush in rapidly to own up and correct it. That’s funny, not funny.

If the transgressor’s intention was benign, they would have thought through and been aware of how their actions were going to hurt and undermine you. If their intentions were honorable and honest, they would not have let it happen in the first place.

When my father died, I repeatedly encountered this. My youngest sister was the sole executor. She had a “fiduciary” duty to treat her sisters – the two other beneficiaries – with an even hand. I knew what was going to happen from the minute I heard that Dad chose her as his representative.

She had treated me with disdain and disrespect for the previous 30 years. She hid this fact from my father. When he asked about our relationship, she lied to him and presented us as “best buds.” Her lying and deceit didn’t end there.

As the estate inexorably made its way through the legal system in a protracted start-stop process over the next 13 years, my sister made sure she profited handily from the arrangement. She loaned herself money from the estate while denying the same privilege to my sister and me.

She seconded all of my father’s personal effects without offering to share or allow access to select favored items for ourselves. Not even items that we had given Dad as gifts. She lied blithely to the estate attorney, the judges, and to me.

Any of my attempts at asking for parity or “fair dealing” were treated like so much dust and air. Even the most inconsequential of items – Dad’s old computer or special furnishings like a wooden coat rack – were withheld in the same manner as Aesop’s fable about the dog in the manger who hoarded hay he couldn’t eat.

In campaigning to become Dad’s executor in the years leading up to his death, she presented him with a special book as a Christmas gift: You Can’t Take It With You. It carefully detailed all of the horrors that could ensue without a proper estate plan and the “right” representative in place. Perhaps I see that more cynically than others might.

As it turned out, she disappeared on a Caribbean vacation in the days leading up to his death. She could not be reached by anyone for four days after he died. She swears she put her contact numbers on a Post-It note on her computer screen. It seems she forgot to tell anyone.

She left my father’s law books in a place where they went moldy and had to be trashed. She put all of his office furniture into a dumpster refusing all pleas from me to hold them. The buyers of the business building said they would happily have held on to those items for me “had they but known.” Having lost their parents themselves, they knew the sentimental value of the items my sister got rid of.

There were many confrontations in the aftermath of my father’s death. Mostly useless. The courts and society treat power with the same even hand. In spite of the evidence, no one would call out my sister for her shifty management of Dad’s funds and property.

I did learn one thing from that sad situation. In the end, Dad’s things didn’t really matter all that much. I grieved them and got over it. Less clutter to deal with.

It was the deeper wounds of treachery, deceit, and cruelty that hurt and caused the most longlasting damage. Mostly, the dissolution of any future facade of family. Permanent estrangement from both sisters was the final consequence. That is not said with bitterness but sadness. It was a preventable tragedy.

I had to walk away for my own self-protection and the preservation of my mental health. When I hear the stories of pettiness and fighting that still goes on among them, I sigh with relief. I no longer want to live or choose to live like that. Hurt people hurt people they say.

I also walked away with certainty about one thing. Whatever else underpinned the cruelty, deceitfulness, envy, and greed in the family situation, it was not solely my fault as my youngest sister was desperate to believe.

It is sad when families learn – like the stranded crew on Apollo 13 who struggled to maintain their cool in a life threatening situation – that after any degree of the fighting and conflict, we end up back in the same place. It is well to remember that in the aftermath of such conflict, our relationships might not make it intact.

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 2

When Grace and Scott realized their marriage would not be blessed with children, they had little choice but to muddle through. In those days, any magnitude of domestic betrayal would not deep-six a marriage. Not socially or legally at any rate. 

Happenstance would step up to deliver them a child. A blood relation but not of their mixed bloodlines, however.

In 1930, in the capital city of New Brunswick about an hour away from Grace and Scott’s country farmhouse, young Jacqueline was still reeling from the recent news of her father’s untimely death. 

Frank Webster had been a cook at sea. One night in a savage and malevolent storm, Jacqueline’s father and all hands on board drowned when their small fishing boat was overwhelmed by a rogue wave. Jacqueline was only eight years old.

Her mother, Lillian – now widowed – simply couldn’t cope with raising three young children in the aftermath of this tragedy. The famil breadwinner was gone and with him her social status as a respectable married lady. 

Lillian took to her bed in what we might now describe as nervous shock. In dire straits, she polled relations and the community for temporary housing and help with her three young children. Montclair James was a couple of years older than Jacqueline. Scott, her little brother, was a couple of years younger. 

Scott fared well. He was placed with a benevolent family who treated him as a part of the family and with love and kindness. Montclair James did not fare as well. He landed in a cruel and demanding family whose only real interest in the boy was the labor he contributed. The beatings and cruelty he endured in that home would play out across his life for the rest of his life. 

When young Jacqueline learned who had stepped up to take her in, she felt she had won the lottery. She was placed with Aunt Grace and Uncle Scott at their farm in Nashwaak Bridge. Into her nineties, she sang their praises as “perfect parents.” 

Returning to live with her natural mother at 13 to attend Normal School (what high school was called then) registered as another loss of beloved people to whom she was deeply attached.

Divorce would have been out of the question for Grace and Scott. Marriage was one of the few certain routes to respectability for young country women. Their worth was usually measured by their ability to create a family. So much so in a rural community that it was not unusual for pre-marital pregnancy to be covertly encouraged to ensure the prospective bride was fertile. 

Grace never had that option. What happened when in her particular tragedy is not at all clear, of course, and like most stories, we are only left with the consequences. 

Young Jacqueline believed she was steeped in Grace’s love and undying devotion as a young girl. It is more likely Jacqueline was doted upon with great urgency by a devastated young wife, devoid of options to extricate herself from a disappointing and unsatisfactory marriage. 

Grace developed a razor-sharp tongue. She exercised it indiscriminately in cutting stories about all the locals that fell out of her favor with her. Given her own losses and betrayal, her anger and bitterness weren’t surprising. An evening’s entertainment would consist of putting down all and sundry and laughing uproariously.

It imbued young Jacqueline with a rather lopsided view of herself and the world. She lauded the McPhersons as somehow superior and above all others in the community. It was an unfortunate perception that isolated young Jacqueline from her birth mother, herself, and some of her children for the rest of her life. 

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 1

Grace Smith came from a small Canadian town near the border between Canada and the US. The Canadian province of New Brunswick and the American state of Maine, to be clear. Grace was born in 1900. Her life and Canada’s were at the same starting gate of sweeping social change brought on by the industrial age.

As did most young girls of her era, young Grace anticipated entering a marriage and having a family of her own when she grew up. Several hours away in Nashwaak Bridge, NB, Scott McPherson was born somewhere in the middle of a passel of Scottish immigrant descendant kids – eight in total. He had older brothers and sisters. Younger ones, too.

The original McPherson clan were retired Scottish military who were given land grants along the Nashwaak River in the late 1700s as a pension for their service. By the early 1900s, most of the McPherson military cachet had worn off. The family mostly made its way through farming and supplemental seasonal work.

It was clear from early on in his life that young Scott would follow in the family logging tradition to earn his keep and make his way. When and where he met young Grace Smith is unclear. But it is pretty safe to assume it was at a church-related function.

For girls and boys in rural New Brunswick just after the turn of the twentieth century, opportunities for social intercourse were strictly contained and chaperoned. Young Grace and Scott probably met up at a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon social.

The girls would have brought baskets full of homemade baked goods as their offerings to the refreshments table. Each food offering was clearly marked so all and sundry would know who had prepared what and how well. The boys had likely washed their hands and hair and even put on a clean shirt for the occasion.

Whatever young Grace Smith was offering, young Scott McPherson took a liking to. Their courtship was focussed and brief. A wedding and casting off into married life ensued pretty quickly.

All and sundry waited patiently – as was the tradition – for news of a blessed event that would herald the start of this new branch of the McPherson family tree. For an unseemly number of years, everyone waited in vain.

Grace and Scott lived through the Great Depression in the early days of their marriage. Scott worked seasonally and with little enthusiasm. Country people generally fared better than city folk in those dark ten years. At least on a farm, there were cows for milk and meat, and chickens for eggs. The bread was homemade and a yeast cake cost four cents. Sweet baked goods were part of the daily fare.

It turned out the delay and eventual abandonment of hoping for that “blessed event” were based on a medical condition. The condition was not that Grace was barren.

Scott’s shiftlessness did not apply to what they called “the pretty ladies” where he was reportedly quite industrious. He was a great flirt and quick with a story and a laugh. Good-looking and well-built, he apparently had a stable of young farm wives and ladies of lesser social standing who were happy to share their baked and other homely goods.

The ultimate outcome, however, neither he nor Grace wanted nor could have they easily foreseen. Scott contracted a venereal disease. He passed it to Grace. Scott’s dalliances and the disease he had caught passed to Grace and rendered her sterile. It is hard to imagine that it was all hearts and flowers in the McPherson marriage.

It is hard to impossible in our modern era to imagine the obstacles young Grace was up against as a young married woman in a rural conservative community. First, she would only have had access to rudimentary medicine. Her life and Scott’s were spared by whatever treatment methods were available at the time. Their potential future progeny were not.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Artistic Long Game

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​—Glenn Gould, Concert Pianist

This quote says so much about what I believe. An artistic path is not necessarily the most financially lucrative pursuit. There has to be something else in it that makes people pursue their art. Or else not many people would pursue art in spite of painfully thin paychecks.

People usually start out in life with vague hopes and dreams. Finding out what they are and manifesting those hopes and dreams is a major preoccupation of young people. Along with learning the basics of what it means to be good citizens, young people set out to fill up their quiver of basic marketable skills.

I silently smirk when I see misleading ads promising would-be writers how to acquire the required skills to make thousands and thousands of dollars a year as a freelance writer. The so-called skills they are touting are misleading, to say the least.

Writing success is an alchemy of talent, opportunity, luck, and mostly hard work. But mostly it is stick-to-it-ism. Writers write. Every aspiring writer knows the sober adage to “put their bum in the seat” and stare down the blank page.

I am bemused by scads of advice currently circulating about developing your voice, setting tone in stories, and developing characters and plots. I have been in the writing business my whole life. I had never seen it treated as much like a “business” as it is today.

Writing was historically generated by people with a basic talent for writing. Producing copy for stories or novels or articles was a type of alchemy. The story was the thing. With the right storyline in the right context with great quotes and color commentary on where the story was based, under the skilled attention of a gifted writer, voila! a decent story would be born.

There was a hierarchy in the newsroom I worked in. We knew who the steady and reliable producers were. They could be counted on to bang out stories on cue and as needed.

Along with those steady producers were writers of varying talents with varying dependability. But if they had won jobs in a newsroom, you could at least assume they knew how to write.

Writing as art evolves. In my experience, the art of writing emerges when an individual begins to develop and use their own voice. So much writing is formulaic. It isn’t hard to teach someone how to write according to the standard inverse triangle required for newspaper articles. Broadcasting copy whether for TV or radio was much the same. Learn the formula and you can do the job.

Creative writing is another avocation. There is something that develops inside an individual when they dig deep to manifest the stories and insights they harbor inside their hearts and minds. It requires insight and curiosity and the ability to ask questions that needed to be asked. This is harder to define but most people recognize superior writing when they see it.

This can take a lifetime of repeated practice by working at their craft. As time passes and the craft is further developed, good writers start to abandon hyperbole. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking. And clear thinking comes from refining and exposing the essence of the stories writers want to tell.

Ernest Hemingway nailed this. His writing was delivered in short, staccato-like sentences that could sum up the beauty or ugliness of a situation in a few concise words. Hemingway started as a journalist and that style ultimately defined his novel writing style.

I have often been bemused by my own writing journey. After a few short years in a newspaper newsroom, I went to university. My first year of university generated many comments from professors about my “choppy, journalistic” writing style.

So I learned about “padding” in university. I would add as many high-sounding, convoluted words as possible to make my academic essays sound profound and knowledgeable. Mostly my essays were simply full of “fat writing.” Why say in ten words – the academic attitude seemed to be – what you can just as easily say in forty-five? No wonder academia is recognized as a game.

Success in academia was mostly guaranteed by the degree to which you could parrot exactly what the professor had doled out in lectures. Original thought and ideas were not as encouraged as one might think in the hallowed halls of education. Conformity was the bigger goal, not originality. Who were we to question the geniuses we were studying?

So I was happy to be reminded by Glenn Gould’s quote that pursuing an artistic path is a path to cultivating peace and serenity and wonder. It is a lifelong pursuit. It is also a very individual one.

Copping Out-ish

It was bound to happen.

I would eventually leave it too late to write a thoughtful post.

Or the greater truth is that I might be burned out, distracted, or overwhelmed.

No matter.

Whatever the reason, I went traipsing around the Internet for a solution to my “postlessness”
and found this. This is my solution for today.

55 Cool and Interesting Websites to Kill Time

It is so cool and so interesting that, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading over there now.

My Internet neighborhood is much too small anyway.

Time to branch out.

Later.

BTW It is Juneteenth today. I hope to have enough material to write about it next year.

A Healing Path

A young lady named Nicole recently asked me a simple question in an online forum I belong to: “What is a healing path?

That question gave me pause. I hadn’t heard the question put so simply before. So this is what I told her.

“My healing path started in earnest when I hit the proverbial brick wall. Everything I believed about my mother’s “love” for me was shattered when she went to bat for my husband in the wake of our divorce.

I went through what is best described as a “dark night of the soul” as I tried to make sense of her betrayal. I was in a very dark place for many years. I was living in an emotional and spiritual shitestorm.

My personal life was a mess. Recently released from my job contract. A new baby was on the way. Marriage breaking down. Mother’s defection.

I sought out a therapist at that time because I simply had no one else to turn to. I could not make rational sense of the many mistakes I had made and was making. I tried to drink away the pain. That stopped working long before I finally quit drinking for good.

My mother’s explanation for my acting out was that I was – possibly – a ” bad seed.” She skilfully omitted the neglect and abuse I experienced in my childhood in her summation of me. The bad things in our childhood were never discussed. It enraged her on the occasions when I tried to bring it up.

My next steps toward healing were because I desperately needed to protect my son. I had previously sought out counselors from time to time before but with the presence of my son on the planet, I was incentivized. There was nothing easy about making the choice to heal and get healthy. Nothing.

When I first started to confront my past and upbringing, everything got progressively worse before it got better. I clung to the belief that life would eventually change and improve. It took a lot of sheer faith to just keep going.

I was driven by my love for my son and the need to create a better, saner life for him. That was the carrot that kept me going. I recognized in those awful early days of my infant son’s life that if I went under, he would go under, too. It was sometime around then that I took full responsibility for my life.

Today I am comfortably estranged from my family of origin. They were not helpful to me and completely devoted to my mother and her narrative.

I realized the decision to create my own life and work through my pain was up to me and me alone. That totally sucked. But it has finally paid off in a certain peace of mind and internal calm that greets me every morning. I stopped drinking almost 23 years ago after several failed earlier attempts.

I am in no way suggesting that my healing path is or should be everyone’s path. But here are some questions to ask yourself to light a fire under the choice to embark on a healing path.

Am I happy with myself and where I am in my life? If not, why not? What’s in the way or holding me back from being happy? Are there patterns I can identify in myself that keep me unhappy? Am I comfortable in my own skin? This is hardly a comprehensive answer.

This is only an anecdote about one person’s path. You know you are on a healing path when you start acting every day in your own interests. Your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are progressively more in alignment with your core beliefs, wishes, desires, and goals. When this is happening, you know you are moving closer to yourself which is the ultimate goal of healing.

I don’t know if this answer is at all helpful. It is a profoundly personal journey. But good on you for asking the question. Ask others. Keep seeking. Failure is a given only when we stop moving forward.

Being confused about where you are heading on a healing path is not failure. Confusion is a legitimate place and an integral part of transitioning to a healthier way of living.

Good luck to you and I hope you do pick the healing path. Not everyone does. It requires a considerable amount of emotional heavy lifting and for quite a long time.

You may one day discover the healthier you are, the better role model and inspiration you can be for others in the world you live in. You can be a better friend, a better parent, and a better champion of your own good self. In short, a better human being. I hope this was of some use to you, Nicole, and wish you well if you elect to set out on your own healing path. It is so worth it.” 

Crabbing About Cursive

I subscribe to very few websites. Many are fitness or health-related. Others are full of inspiring quotes from towering historical figures. And this one.

WordGenius. https://www.wordgenius.com/

I am a subscriber because words are its subject matter and I love words. This website manages to push out a new word every day that I have never heard of before.

I apologize if that sounds arrogant. I know a lot of words. But it turns out I don’t know every word, as WordGenius makes abundantly clear with its daily delivery to my Inbox.

It is nice to find myself regularly surprised by what I don’t know (only about words and writing, of course. There is tons I don’t know about nuclear physics or astral projection.)

An article on Cursive Writing showed up in my inbox along with the regular Word of the Day post (Deedy for those who might be interested. Fittingly it means someone who gets a lot of deeds done. Who knew?)

I am among those who grieve the denouement of handwriting. It has become a lost art. Like many lost arts (tatting, common decency, moonshining, manners), we are collectively poorer.

I had a real-life lesson in abandoning cursive. I attended a post-graduate program some years back at uni. I decided to take notes only on my computer. Big mistake. Handwriting experts agree that the mind better learns when what you hear is written down. Something about the positive connection between hearing and writing.

My daughter once came to me as a very little girl and asked me if I would teach her what I was doing: “Can you show me how to do that curly writing?” I know she learned cursive as she was at the tail-end of a generation that learned it but now seems to have abandoned it.

So I will let the WordGenius folks make the argument for cursive and the importance of keeping handwriting alive. It is both creative endeavor and an enhancement of learning. Remember the importance of handwriting analysis to identify and formulate conclusions about the character of the writer.

While cursive is now out of fashion, I put my faith in the pendulum swinging back to a place where it is valued and widely used again.

I will reverse the order of the article to share WordGenius‘ take on the importance of handwriting. The more interested and ambitious readers can read to the end to learn about the history of cursive writing. More there than I ever knew about.

Does Anyone Still Use Cursive?

  • Cursive writing has been used less and less since the 1980s. Quite simply, since computers became the new big thing, people don’t write as much by hand. Grade schools teach computer skills instead of penmanship. So is there still a use for cursive? Absolutely! Handwriting helps us remember. This goes for all handwriting, not just cursive. The Wall Street Journal says that actively forming letters with pen and paper reinforces language concepts and helps the brain remember. It’s a lot more effective than just reading and memorizing, especially for kids. That’s why so many teachers stress taking notes by hand — they know that many students who put pen to paper tend to remember concepts better. And no matter how many digital devices you have, you’ll need to use writing utensils at some point. Maybe you need to scribble a note or mark something in a book. Maybe your phone died, and you can’t type an appointment into your calendar. Technology is good, but it’s not omnipotent. Instead of sloppy chicken-scratch, take some pride in your penmanship. Start reviving the lost art of cursive today.

Gratuitous Information for word nerds “About the History of Cursive” from the good people at WordGenius.com

As with many thousands-of-years-old practices, cursive writing was more of a collective effort than something we can attribute to one person. It goes as far back as the Roman Empire, after written language first developed.

Square capitals were used on inscriptions on buildings and monuments (some of which are still standing), but cursive (or script) was used for daily writing. Scripts and styles have changed since the fifth century. In the eighth century, monks created the Carolingian script — the earliest form of standardized cursive that others built upon. This script evolved during medieval times, and its twists and curls became harder to read before the Renaissance revived the Carolingian way.

The earliest form of cursive you probably recognize is called Copperplate. Calligrapher Timothy Matlack penned Thomas Jefferson’s words on the original copy of the Declaration of Independence using the Copperplate script. While beautiful, this fancy calligraphy just wasn’t practical for everyday writing.

A teacher named Platt Rogers Spencer developed a new form of penmanship around the mid-1800s. He came up with the name “chirythmography,” from the Greek words for “timed handwriting.” He used a metronome for writers to keep pace with his elliptical letters, which he claimed were inspired by nature.

The “Spencerian” method was taught in schools for the latter half of the 19th century. Quick-working clerks and telegraph operators translating Morse code into script found the Spencer cursive still too time-consuming.

Next up: Austin Palmer and the Palmer Method. His idea was to make cursive writing more practical and lose the fancy flourishes from the Renaissance days. This form of script was very popular in the early 20th century and can probably be seen in old letters from your great and great-great-grandparents.

Penmanship started to become big business. It was taught in grade schools, and adults entering the business world got a leg up if they completed a course in a penmanship school. The Zanerian College of Penmanship became the Zaner-Bloser Company, selling handwriting instruction material to schools.

(Fun fact: Still around today, Zaner-Bloser, Inc., publishes Highlights for Children magazine.)The Zaner-Bloser cursive and the later D’Nealian cursive are the simple scripts that were taught in grade school for the second half of the 20th century.

Complificated

I witnessed the dawning of the internet and the era of new technology. I distinctly remember technology’s promise of simplification. 

We would work in paperless offices, we were told. Boring and tedious office jobs would disappear. Life would be generally much better and more efficient.

Balderdash.

Technology mostly seems to have complicated things in my life. Two-step authentication. Type in this code. Password after password after password. Scrambling to figure out which phone is ringing when I am sitting in a restaurant with friends. Unwelcome texts or imploring messages that require my immediate attention at any time of the night or day.

Beware of those who tell you that what they are selling will “simplify your life.” Often so-called “simple solutions” turn out to be more trouble than they are worth. They’re “complificated.”

I am wary of inflated promises generally. For two main reasons. One is that there are lots of promises out there usually made by someone who is trying to sell you something. 

The salesperson’s job is to convince you their service/product/subscription/pet rock is as necessary and desirable as air and water. The really good salespeople and ad agencies somehow actually do. I have a number of “What was I thinking ?” items in my household.

The second reason is that promises must be backed up by performance. Whatever promises are attached to any item, you will really only experience and appreciate its’ true value after you have owned and used it for a while. In my world, the proof is in the pudding.

I have countless examples of items in my life that didn’t perform “exactly as advertised.” I bet you do, too.

I am a faithful subscriber to Consumer Reports and appreciate they have been largely untouched by scandal or assaults on their reputation. I visit them frequently when a large purchase is on the horizon. They have no skin in the game when it comes to commission or salary. That, in itself, makes them trustworthy advisors.

I get that rapidly changing technology is a fact of life and a “new normal” for young people. And I am beyond impressed by the advances made in technology that allows us to do what we do in our personal lives.

I have a friend who still uses a flip phone. Limited to be sure but it is cheap and does everything he wants it to do. I am not happy paying a bunch more money for a new phone that “increases my user experience” by a few extra pixels in my iPhone. I can’t wade through the pictures I already have. 

These days I employ a certain caution and skepticism in my own life about “newer technology.” I spend time trying to reason out how significantly better the newest version of a technology is going to make to my life. 

The paperless office turned out to be a myth. I use scads of paper still. And still intend to. As AI and other “new technologies” appear on the scene with all the doom saying and fears about the future impact, I am very much in “wait and see” mode. 

No doubt Google and Facebook and other technologies know more than I would like about my shopping habits and my financial preferences. I may eat my words if I suffer serious consequences up the road.

But in order to keep my life simple and my peace of mind intact, I am taking the Teddy Kennedy approach: “I will drive off that bridge when I get to it.”