Well, blog me down!

Thanks to my big sis Lona for letting me “guest post” on her blog. I also retired recently and am in the process of figuring out who and what I am now that I’m no longer a federal bureaucrat. I’ve never blogged before, so I thought maybe I should start out by writing about why I’m trying blogging.

Letter writing. I’ve taken to writing letters to my grandchildren. When I started it seemed like the most natural thing in the world–some of them have left home for the first time to live on campus, and all of them are far away.

But I very quickly realized that a letter was a very old-fashioned way to communicate. With email, messaging, and a phone in every pocket, people just don’t need to write letters any more. It’s no wonder that mail deliveries since 2000 have plummeted to levels not seen since the 1970s. *

But the other thing I realized was that I liked letter writing precisely because it was old fashioned. I don’t really feel old, but I do, apparently, feel old-fashioned. Many things I did as a kid that I like doing now fall into that category, but even more than that, I like doing things that I considered old-fashioned as a kid–the stuff I saw (or imagined) my grandparents doing. Like letter-writing.

Fountain pen. Kathleen found a box of old fountain pens at the thrift store for a dollar. Intellectually I remembered why fountain pens fell into disuse once ball-points appeared: they needing continual cleaning, they skipped and blotched, and if you used one for long your shirt would fall victim to the dreaded “black spot”, unless you used a pocket protector. (The pocket protector, of course, was the necessary nerd/geek fashion accessory for scientists and engineers in my youth; there’s a webseum of pocket protectors here, if you’re interested.)

But despite the headaches of fountain pens, when they worked as designed, they produced a clean elegant line, and it felt good in the hand to write with one. And using one certainly felt old-fashioned, like the proper way to write a letter. So I cleaned one up, got some ink, and tried using it for my new-found letter writing passion. It was great, until it started skipping and blotching and I couldn’t fix it by cleaning it, so I gave it up and got a Pilot gel pen. Sometimes you have to let your feelings sway your intellect, sometimes not. And at least I was still writing letters longhand.

Cursive handwriting. Long-hand, now that’s something that’s really old-fashioned, just the ticket for me. It’s suitably outdated: I’m told the Common Core academic standards for English language education include age-appropriate standards for mastery of keyboards and digital equipment even in grades 1-3, but they don’t any more include any standards for cursive handwriting.

I remember learning how to do block lettering from my Dad, who did engineering stuff for a living, and who could (and still can) reproduce that blocky engineering font to perfection. (Check out Lona’s info-graphic blogs and you’ll see she learned from him too!). But for letter-writing, nothing beats a good cursive hand, and I think I learned this from my Mom, and from her mom.

I especially remember one particular letter I learned from watching my Gamma Jo write: the “Palmer final t”. This was a variation of the Palmer cursive script which was only allowed when the “t” fell at the end of a word. It looks like this:

As a boy I thought that was just the neatest, so quaint and ancient, just like my gamma, and I tried always to use it whenever I wrote longhand. Though I didn’t always remember to use it, I did it enough that it became a habit that sticks with me still.

The Palmer Method of Penmanship was popular at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, so was just the thing my grandmother would have learned–she was born almost exactly at the start of the century. I have no idea what method was in vogue when they taught me cursive handwriting, but if Palmer was good enough for grandma, it’s good enough for me. Perfectly old school!

I had a brief moment where I thought maybe even Palmer wasn’t antiquated enough, and took a look at Spencerian penmanship, which according to online was the standard writing style starting around 1850. To me, it looks like it could have been used to write the Constitution, if you write your “s”s like “f”s. But I tried to write like that and it was too much work, so I quit.  

(Turns out I wasn’t the only one. According to www.campaignforcursive.com,

Blog writing. So I had my activity picked out, I had my medium, my tools, and my method, and I had a built-in audience. And it’s been great! Not all the grandkids are particularly interested in getting a missal from old grandpa, but enough of them are. So that’s working out just fine. But as I think about topics, I find there are things I’d like to write about, that I can’t believe even the most doting grandchild will want to read about in a letter from me.

For example, how did I get to be 65 years old and never know about Coconut Liquid Aminos?? Is it really coconut tree sap, or coconut blossom nectar, or both, or neither? Is it pronounced like the plural of amino, or does it rhyme with vámonos? Is its existence really a secret, as stated on the label of one brand? Does it really make you live to be 120 years old, as claimed on another label? All I know is that it’s tastier than soy sauce (incredible, I know), and it’s inscrutable in vaguely spiritual ways. I would very much like to investigate it, and write about it, but not to my poor grandkids who have their own, better, spiritual mysteries to navigate right now.

So maybe I’ll write about it in a blog.

This came out longer than I planned. Thanks for reading, if you got this far!

-Dorn Carlson
6/19/2019