Curses!

My new stationery arrived just the other day.  I had picked it out at an adorable store, All She Wrote.

Denise, the manager, was super-helpful and together we chose an ecru-colored, slightly-textured paper with my name, cell phone number and email address all in a pretty cobalt blue script.  I think it’s terribly attractive.

And it just begged to be written on.

So I broke out a matching blue pen and dashed off a casual note to a friend.

OMG.  It was a total disaster.

Don’t get me wrong.  The missal itself was witty, charming and brief.

And completely illegible.

Not only could the recipient not read it, I couldn’t make out one word.

My handwriting has gone to Palmer Cursive Method Hell.

Back in the day at the Avoca School in Wilmette, Illinois, I had been pretty adept at the Palmer Cursive Script method.  (I always thought it had been invented by classmate Ernie Palmer’s family, btw.)  And I diligently practiced and practiced my capital and small letters.

I desperately longed to have neat handwriting- like Ellen Woloshin or Shellie Piller or Vicki Crossley.  (Who was a lefty and her graceful script was almost straight up and down instead of slanted.  It looked sharp.)

This was the big third grade goal to which I aspired.  Fabulous handwriting.

Good Timing Sidebar: Alas, I didn’t have a single old handwriting sample to show you, but then, out of the blue, my old Avoca school classmate, Judy Klass Lynch, suddenly emailed me something she had unearthed in an old Monopoly game box.

It was a board game we had made up sometime back in the fifth grade or so.  It was called “Stocks and Bonds.”

And, X years later, Judy had just found my handmade certificates.

Thanks, Judy. (And I still think there is a market for our game.)

As you can see, I never achieved Palmer greatness, but at least my script was legible.

But over the years my handwriting has suffered terrible erosion.

I’m not sure when I started printing everything.  Maybe in high school- when it became cooler to print in funny half-rounded letters like this:

And after I lived in Italy, my cursive turn another turn for the worse. Not only did I print everything for clarity’s sake- it’s hard to read someone else’s foreign script- but I added the line across the 7 that I still do to this day.

Ecco!

But writing script is an exercise like any other and three years ago, when I launched this blog, I still made all my notes in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

And my handwriting actually started to come back. The more I wrote, the better it looked.

Enter the iPhone.

At first, whenever I had an idea, I would jot it down in the “Notes” section.  But soon I started writing more and more of the post directly onto this, and shortly thereafter, whenever inspiration struck, I made straight for the phone- or my iPad.

And today my hand-eye-pen coordination is completely shot and the result is the garbled mess you saw above.

And now, you’ll have to excuse me.  I’m going to practice my capital letters.

And then…

While I’m practicing, watch this third grader take a turn at the blackboard.