pen. man. ship.

on writing, together

Unlike my grandfather, my father and my brother, and unlike my mother and my wife - both teachers - I am cursed with terrible handwriting. While my spelling is somewhat superior, my grammar generally great and my punctuation playfully present and accounted for - Oxford commas typically included, except for much of this paragraph - I've never had good penmanship.

As a boy, I tended to achieve high marks. Except for penmanship. As a boy, in cases when I didn't receive high marks, I at least received the now classic "good effort, tries hard". Except for penmanship.

As a teenager, I wrote notes by pen, selecting increasingly better pens in the hopes it would improve my writing, blaming the tools instead of the master. As a more mature college student I started to use a pencil, mechanical at first with a separate eraser allowing for easier corrections to force-body diagrams, math equations, and German sentence structures with their necessary mathematical-like precision. I liked to write small with 0.5mm lead - though really, and always if you check the history books, graphite - and college-ruled paper filling page upon page that from afar looked neat and orderly, attempting to disguise my poor handwriting with an optical illusion afforded by shrinking the (dis)playing surface. I've tried changing my handwriting style. I’ve moved from standard straight lines and curves, to left leaning then to right leaning, then back to center - not to dissimilar from my political preferences over the years - to cursive and then to all uppercase - which is around the time I tried to make the point that we should have capital numbers like we have capital letters (I was a math major after all) - and then to a combination of all styles all at once.

I'm 43 and I still have difficulty reading my own writing, making mistakes as I try to decipher the birthday cards I write to my wife and kids when they ask what I wrote. The more things change, the more they stay the same: illegible. Maybe I should have been a doctor. It's gotten to the point where I've considered taking a handwriting course which would be fairly on brand for me: I asked for piano lessons at 21.

And yet, I still write all my notes by hand, still write cards to people every week, still write out my grocery list that my wife sends me via Apple Notes or text message, still prefer to write out visuals by hand, a chicken’s scratch of ideas, concepts and layouts for future transcribing into a Miro Board or Google Slides document, all the while testing out new handwriting styles. I'm proof that Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours approach to mastery does not work 100% of the time.

As a civil servant in ancient China, I would have been a failure. According to Mark Kurlansky in his book Paper: Paging through History,¹ "handwriting was considered as important as content." As a result, I would have opened myself to "all kinds of judgments [that] could be made by looking at someone's handwriting.”

But yet I write. By hand. Still.

As a child of the '80s and ‘90s, I remember friends and classmates - mostly female - having pen pals. I take that somewhat back. If a school assignment called for us to start a pen pal correspondence, while most if not all of us would start the assignment, it was the females in the class who maintained the snail mail exchange long after grades were due.

While I was far from the exception - and far from exceptional - there was one summer when I started a periodic pen pal parlay with a boy from East Islip, Long Island, New York. It was the summer of 1988. My parents saved for a family trip to Smuggler's Notch, Vermont and we piled into the family station wagon a la the Griswolds and headed north up Interstates 91 and 89. While I don't remember much from the trip up, I am nearly certain it was filled with games of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? with my father leading the way; the Alphabet Game where we try to be the first to spell out the alphabet start to finish with letters found on signs, license plates, cars and storefronts (I'm known to still play this game not only with my own kids but in my head in both forwards and backwards order to pass the time on long drives alone); listening to music on tape from my dad's Case Logic cassette holder filled with hits from the '50s and '60s ("Yeah, this is the Big Bopper speaking”); and staring out the window framing the passing New England landscape filled with life-affirming green fields, Dionysian dales and verdant valleys - without GameBoys or electronics to speak of, this is what passed as entertainment. It somehow still achieved the high score.

His name was Teddy and we met at the resort's kids' club, likely during a game of Red Rover, a game no longer played due to a few arm fractures and shoulder dislocations. He was a shy boy, like me, and we struck up an instant, if week-long, friendship. We exchanged addresses before departing, our family stopping at Ben & Jerry's on the way back home, where we got to tour the factory in Waterbury, Vermont, sampling Chocolate Fudge Brownie fresh off the factory line and seeing the two Long Island transplants walking the factory, Ben in his rainbow helicopter hat and Jerry at his side - or was it the other way around?

Teddy and I exchanged a few letters, describing the remaining days of summer and the return to school that fall. We made plans to meet - my mom's entire family and my dad's parents still lived on the island. We never did. We eventually stopped writing, I'm not sure who first.

At least two sets of great and known men across history kept up a pen pal relationship for decades despite their vehement political disagreements, something that today would be taboo. John Adams, a Massachusetts Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a Southern (motherfuckin’) Democratic Republican,² maintained both a healthy dislike of each other's political points of view, and a healthy writing practice that today - or maybe 40 years ago when they were en vogue - would serve as master classes for correspondence courses in politics, history, and friendship. They wrote to each other with near fervent regularity up to and even after each other's death - both on July 4 1826 - each household receiving the other's last letters after their deaths.

Similarly, as so lyrically ensconced in Hamilton: The Musical,³ even as they raced towards an inevitable duel that would render the Vice President an outcast and the former Secretary of the Treasury mortally wounded in New Jersey, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton argued back and forth via handwritten letter, laying out their points and opposition to each other, growing increasingly hostile while still signing each "your obedient servant" with their initials to follow.

I sign nearly all my handwritten notes - and my electronically typed ones - with a singular initial: J. Some of the time, I sign JK, providing the reader with a question of whether what I just wrote was a joke. I never tell.

I started this piece talking about handwriting, about penmanship, and it's where I'll conclude, with a slight twist.

Historians have found more than 2000 letters to and from Michelangelo. I'm approaching a tenth of that since I started sending weekly, handwritten notes to friends, family and colleagues. What has by now taken about seven minutes of your reading time for me to say is I'm here to put that poor penmanship to use. I plan to pick up a pen (or in my case, more likely a pencil), select a man, and ship him a letter.

Which brings me to the true point of this essay: what's your mailing address? I'd like to send you a letter or a postcard some time. Maybe we can even be pen pals for the summer.

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2. Yes, this is a Hamilton reference. And not the last.

3. There’s the second - and last - reference.