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Friday, Sep. 25, 2009

No legible signs of a comeback

My mother keeps part of her legacy in a sturdy box.

Inside are love letters her father wrote to her mother during their courtship.

They are tethers to the man she never knew — the daddy who went fishing on the Flint River, caught a death sentence called pneumonia and died before she was born in 1928.

Time has covered his fingerprints on the small envelopes. They carried the return address of Bainbridge Vulcanizing Co., which sold tires. It took a 2-cent stamp to dispatch the letters across the cotton fields and creek beds to my grandmother’s home in Brinson.

There was never a need for him to include her address. He could simply write her name in that graceful swirl of vowels and consonants, then attach her hometown and the abbreviation R.F.D.

It was only when she caught the train to Athens and the University of Georgia that he had to be specific: Miller Hall, Room 20.

Thursday was National Punctuation Day, a day when we were to revel in exclamation points, have debates about question marks and pause to celebrate commas.

Forget the war on terror. Let’s declare war on dangling participles and weapons of mass conjugation.

I read some of my grandfather’s letters early Thursday morning. They were beautifully written, with almost no hairs out of place.

Years ago, my mother gave me an English composition book that belonged to him. He had made notations in the margins, like pages in a family Bible.

Even more admirable than his writing was that he even wrote at all. I’m not sure my grandfather owned a typewriter or could have afforded one.

In this age of text messages and e-mail forwards, letter writing is becoming a lost art. In his day, Twitter was a sound you might hear from a covey of quail. It had nothing to do with rolling his thumbs across a tiny cell phone keyboard in 140 characters or less.

My grandfather didn’t tweet. He quilled.

The man possessed incredible penmanship, which is vanishing like invisible ink. I wonder how long it took to craft those letters, balancing words on the page under the flow of a fountain pen.

My mother remembers being taught the “Palmer Method of Penmanship,” using rhythmic motions of the arm and hand to form letters. She learned to push and pull characters through the dotted lines with her pen, like a needle and thread.

At the top of the blackboards in her classrooms were permanent diagrams of how each letter of the alphabet was shaped. Those chalky blackboards are changing, too, replaced with dry-erase boards.

Today, many school systems are placing less of an emphasis on cursive writing. If we ever do become a paperless society, I wonder if we’ll be a nation of typists instead of writers.

I will never win any penmanship awards. Neither will at least two of my three sons. (I’m not revealing which two, but they know who they are.)

Maybe it’s genetic. My father was a physician and had handwriting that can only be interpreted by pharmacists. I print almost everything, rarely using cursive except to sign my name.

Penmanship is either losing its way or already has.

Sadly, I’m not seeing any legible signs of a comeback.

Reach Gris at 744-4275 or gris@macon.com.