More Than Your John Hancock (#262)

Yesterday, I paid my bills. I took them to the café I like best, sat at the counter and wrote twelve checks. Stuck on my return address labels, slapped on some colorful Latin Music stamps and put the envelopes in size order. Then I ran a few errands and stopped by the P.O. on the way home to drop them into the outside box.

I know this is old-fashioned of me, but I love writing my checks. I put “exactly” before a round amount like forty dollars, the way my mother did. My dates read “19 April, 2012.” I love the idea that humans have carried paper letters from sender to recipient for centuries. It makes me feel part of a long chain of humanity that includes the Pony Express riders. Call me nostalgic and sentimental, I don't care.

Many of my friends pay automatically, through their computers. I can see the benefits: efficiency, trackability, less paper in the recycling bin. But there's one huge downside: no handwriting. Look around your own life. When do you write by hand any more? Parents make lists with their smartphone's note function. VPs write dates in iCal using their thumbs. Postcards are vanishing from the 21st century landscape and letters are pretty much already gone. These days most people just write their names... on credit card signature lines or at the voting booth. Maybe on a birthday card. When was the last time you wrote a complete sentence by hand?

The trouble with progress is that after a certain length of time there are a lot of people in the world who don't understand what they're missing. Good things get lost, and then the people who knew about them grow old and the last, say, roadside telephone booth disappears.

My grandmother, who was born in 1906, stated writing letters to me when I was seven and I still have most of them. She wrote in green ball point and signed them with a little drawing of a seagull. Her writing was legible but you could tell she was thinking fast. She had a rushing-around personality, and her handwriting looked that way: sharp points on it, and lots of width as the pen raced across the page. Not big round grade-school printing like my Mom's, which I admired but could never replicate. The word “signature” isn't metaphoric: both of them expressed character traits through their handwriting, in a way that choosing among ten fonts and using emoticons on a screen just can't compete with. My mom was patient and followed most of the rules. My grandmother was in a hurry to get outside and live her real life, banding birds.

I'm well aware that handwriting, like the phone booth, is doomed. But just like my crusades on behalf of correct grammar and using the word “bottom” instead of that synonym for a donkey when you're speaking in public, it will disappear over my dead body. And I mean that literally.