I got a handwritten note from my aunt in the mail today. I think one think I am happy I have known in my lifetime, but I suspect will eventually go the way of the buffalo (and I am doing nothing to help keep alive) is simple, personal, hand-written mail. The un-standard size, an actual stamp, not-franking codes and cursive stands out more than all the direct market bullshit filler, brightly colored going to be recycled confetti. Probably in a couple of decades some marketing genius dink will have a light bulb snap on and we’ll all be getting mail with pen-applied ink and it will feel novel and new and weird.

I blame my handwriting as to why I am fully incapable of a handwritten card or note or thank you. OK, that, and the fact that I am completely self-absorbed and thoughtless, and a self-sabotaging procrastinator who couldn’t possibly bring herself to think that much about someone else and act accordingly. But, no, really, I hate physically writing anything but notes to myself. My writing is child-like scrawling, manic, unformed, uneven, clearly worse than a “C” in penmanship. I blame that on the humiliation of having to go back to my old class with the second graders for penmanship after I had already insinuated myself in the third grade. Oh the shame of that half hour in my day, when I had to get up and leave, while the third graders did what? I do not know. Probably fluid dynamics or advanced string theory or something equally profound to which I will always be ignorant.

I also blame the dissolution of the
the Palmer Method in public schools for my crappy handwriting. I always thought my mother’s script was kind of magical. It always looped and connected and looped and connected in exactly the same place and in the same way every time. Better yet, this elegant simplicity really helped with forgeries. “To Whom It May Concern, Please excuse my daughter from school today. She has a dentist appointment.” Presto, no gym class for me. My aunt has the same writing. It’s writing from another time sadly.