Handwritten

I learned, earlier this summer, that there is a national penmanship competition, something like the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but for handwriting. The young girl who won first place this year had a word of advice for potential future penmanship champions: Take your time. Don't rush. Slow and steady wins the penmanship trophies 

It's good advice. I know this, because my handwriting is dreadful, nothing more than scribble, and that is because I write fast, when I hand write anything at all, which I don't often do. But it wasn't always that way. When I was a young girl at a Philadelphia Catholic school in the 1970s, I wrote beautifully. I had to, of course - all the stories about nuns and handwriting are 100 percent true, and penmanship was a graded subject for us. I was a straight A student and I was determined to remain one, so I practiced my Palmer Method. 

But I didn't just practice to keep my place at the top of my class at St. John the Baptist. I practiced because I loved penmanship. I loved forming perfect, elegant looping letters, and I loved feeling my Bic pen scratching across the pale blue-lined pages of my marble composition books. Then as now I spent most of my time reading and writing. 

I competed in a city-wide Catholic school spelling bee when I was in 7th grade. The girl who was the unofficial boss of our school’s team didn’t invite me to join, and I didn’t stand up for myself, and I thought that was the end of it. Then on the day before the bee, the rest of the team heard that I’d been deliberately excluded, and they insisted on adding me to the team. This wasn’t because I was such a popular favorite. It was because I was a really good speller. As a last-minute entrant with one day to study, I got fourth place in that spelling bee, the only top ten finish in our school. I was happy to have done well but I didn’t care that much - spelling came so naturally to me that I wasn’t particularly proud of my skill, any more than I was proud of my blue eyes or brown hair. I was just born that way. But I worked really hard at my handwriting, and I was proud of it. If there had been a handwriting competition, I’d have been first in line to enter, and I would have practiced. I might not have won  - I wasn’t a natural - but I’d have been a contender. 

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Well of course there’s a point to all of this because when do I ever go off on ridiculous irrelevant tangents? I’m planning a trip right now and there’s a lot to keep track of - hotel reservations and plane tickets and ground transportation and passport numbers and daily itineraries - it’s a lot to keep straight in my mind. It’s a lot to remember. Of course, I set up a dedicated folder for all emails pertaining to the trip, but I like to know things right off the top of my head, and I don’t want to depend on my phone for everything. So I’m going to write it all down, in a brand-new notebook. Writing it down will serve two purposes; one being that everything will be written down somewhere in case my phone dies or gets stolen or is otherwise inaccessible to me, and the other being that the very act of writing things down helps me to remember them. And then there’s a third thing, an added bonus - I can work on my handwriting, which really needs work. 

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When I heard the story about the penmanship competition, I immediately got a pen and paper (ruled, of course) and started practicing the classic penmanship test sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This sentence contains every letter of the alphabet, making it ideal for practicing your Palmer Method. I managed to scratch out a few neatly written lines - the page actually looked rather pretty - but there's no way that I'd get past the first round in any sanctioned competition. My handwriting, even when I make an effort to keep it neat and legible, is an unorthodox hybrid of printing and cursive that would not stand up to the most careless scrutiny, let alone the gimlet eye of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I couldn't even remember how to write a Z in Palmer Method. I'm 40 years out of practice. 

But that’s OK. I’m not going to enter any penmanship contests, but that doesn’t mean I can’t work on my handwriting just to improve it for the sake of improvement. My notebook is slowly filling up with useful information, in non-standard but neat and clear (and large because my eyesight is not what it was) handwriting. I’m finding as I do this that there is another benefit to hand writing notes. That young penmanship champion was right - you really have to take your time. And when you do take your time and make the effort to write clearly and neatly, you are forced to slow your roll a bit. You have to be thoughtful and deliberate. You can’t multi-task your way through hand-writing a trip plan. You have to take a one thing at a time approach, which not only ensures that you’ll do a better job at whatever task you’re trying to accomplish, it also clears the clutter from your brain. And mine is considerably cluttered. 

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Today I attended a meeting of the university’s Journal Club. This sounds like something I would have wanted to do when I was 11 or so. I would have loved a journal club - a group of like minded girls sitting around with our journals, reading our best bits aloud, discussing books and movies, and maybe eating fancy snacks and sipping tea. But I didn't know any like minded girls. Not one of my friends would have been even slightly interested in sitting around, reading and writing, and talking about reading and writing. We played games and listened to records and stampeded around the neighborhood but we never once sat in a circle with journals on our laps. A pity.  

Journal Club was of course nothing like a childhood dream journal club but it was still pretty awesome. We listened to a speaker and watched a TED Talk and then we answered discussion questions in writing. Some of the other participants wrote their answers in the meeting chat but I got a pen, found a clean page in my notebook, and put it all on paper. Later on, I'll finish the final Journal Club requirement, a short reflection, which I'll write in Google Docs. That's the difference between paper and pen and a computer. The former is for writing things down. The latter is for writing, full stop. 

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My trip is almost planned. We decided to skip Galway this time - it’s pretty far from Dublin and Belfast - and just spend the last two days in Dun Laoghaire from where we can explore some Dublin Bay sights. I’m trying to get tickets for Kilmainham Gaol, which is much more popular than a jail (or gaol) should be. I’m looking for Belfast walking tour recommendations. I saw an advertisement for a murals tour that promised a “balanced view” of the Troubles, with due consideration given to both the Republican and Loyalist points of view. The Google Ads geniuses don’t know their audience, because I’m not at all interested in a neutral interpretation of the Troubles; at least not until the British get out of Ireland. But that’s not the point. The point is that all of the details on these various excursions are or soon will be neatly recorded in pen and ink in my notebook. If I lose my phone or my connection, I’ll have a notebook to refer to. And I’ll remember things better for having written them down. And you never know when I might want to try for that penmanship trophy.