Dear Wally #113
Dear Wally:
I’ve recently started writing
old fashioned letters to friends. It
seems prehistoric, but it feels great mailing a letter and having to wait days
(not seconds) for a reply. Is anyone
else out there doing this?
-C arla
Dear Carla:
The actual friction generated
from pen on paper is something for which I yen.
If one writes hard enough (and I suppose well enough?), one can actually start a small fire, in every
sense. Until I started letter writing
recently myself, I’d revisit this
antiquated act but once a month in tiny little fits, thanks pretty much only to
my recurring, bloated Verizon bill, which I feel better paying by paper check--
I have an easier go of it when I am invariably on the phone with Customer
Service and have something soft to smack my forehead with.
But otherwise the only time I
get to write with a pen these days is when I lay down my already illegible
signature on the credit card receipt, and even then I usually let my 4 yr old
daughter scratch out a rendering of a cow and a sun in the signature box and it
bears a suspicious resemblance to my own crappy signature. Must be genetics.
All the fluid kinetics of prose
are gone these days, with typing and texting, that’s for sure. Gone, too, are the fine motor skills of guiding a #2 pencil
to your mouth and chomping in frustration when you are mid-test and can’t
remember the year of the Yalta Conference.
(Oh #2 pencil! Why didn’t you get
hip and evolve into the #3 pencil?).
I remember spending a lot of
time practicing my penmanship in second grade which is where my level of
proficiency seems to be permanently retarded .
The most flagrant act of
‘cheating’ in school for me ever was my (creative? I like to think so…)
workaround in that very grade. I will
never forget: The day’s lesson that dark
October Tuesday was to make a lowercase cursive ‘k’, which even now is a freaky
spasm of a letter to have to sketch out.
In a panicky, opportune moment,
and under the hawkish scowl of Mrs. Slotkins,
a minky, whippet of a thing who
paced our ranks like a pissed-off dominatrix who had been stiffed for her
services with counterfeit hundred dollar bills,
and whose buck teeth were the subject of much surreptitious daily doodling,
I drew a lowercase ‘L’ and tucked a lowercase ‘e’ right up under its
skirt.
That was the crime.
And I damn near wet myself for
fear of getting caught, which I got immediately thereafter. (I was a pretty obedient kid back then,
somehow, and was of the strong belief that NY State was still using “Old
Smokey” the electric chair in SingSing for small boys for even minor
transgressions). So getting caught was
pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy for this here squirrely lil’
lawbreaker.
The jumbled letters looked quite
a bit like a lowercase k. But not so
much that Mrs. Slotkins let it slide. I
was led to the front of the class by my ear and publically castigated for the
forgery. As an aside, Mrs. Slotkins and
I would soon again butt heads (butthead being the operative contraction) as I
chose to spell ‘color’ on a quiz with a ‘u’ (colour) only to be told that here
in America, we don’t take kindly to British affectations. My protestations that 1)it was right there
in plain, errr, English in my mom’s dictionary, and that 2)my ancestry prior to
the last 200 years here in America, was pretty much undiluted English and
didn’t that buy me some wiggle room? (the answer is no) went nowhere.
Anyway, Slotkins (if I may) also
proverbially smarted my knuckles for starting the occasional written sentence
with “And…” –a habit I have yet to shake and one I think responsibly reflects
the slippery conversational nature of our daily American English, thus best
serving interpersonal communications- the whole point of language in the first
place, right?
She said 2nd graders
were allowed to neither pick their noses in her class nor start sentences with
And or But. And I’ve been doing it ever
since. But not every sentence.
The fine motor skills of actual
writing are these days being marginalized by the more oft-employed gross motor
skills of making an ‘L’ on one’s forehead with one’s finger and one’s thumb and
sealing the whole deal with an ever-loving eye roll and foot stomp as pre-teen fingers text something like
O.M.G. W.A.L. (go ahead- guess!)
Writing, actual writing, is on
its way to becoming a lost art.
Condolences may be emailed.
My daughter’s Pre-K teacher
suggested that I encourage crayon and pencil use (how dull?!) instead of
iridescent, gooey markers that do all the work because kids today are not
learning how to actually squeeze an object, push down and develop finger
strength. Well, talk to my torqued- out eyeglasses, and tweaked-out chest hair
which my daughter yanks with a wicked Kung-Fu grip and hurls across the entire
span of the living room with gusto. I’m
not worried about this generation’s finger strength.
But writing in a world of
texting? It’s lonely, delayed gratification business, so I applaud you, Carla
(even though you typed this letter to me and emailed it). I’m only passing judgment to the extent that
I feel old fashioned in saying that there’s still value in keeping the writing
skill set sharp. If we lose the skill
set, then what? In a massive power grid
failure, I could probably notch out an advice column or two into the bark of a
large oak with my (#2?) chainsaw. My
handwriting in chainsaw font couldn’t possibly be worse than my cursive in
pencil…
So, keep it up and enjoy. And write your next letter to me by hand,
though I confess I haven’t the foggiest idea where you would actually send it…
-Wally
Questions should probably still
be emailed to cwn4@aol.com
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