Letters

Looking at my grandfather's grammar school certificate of graduation today (from Colusa Grammar school in California) I was struck by two things. It is by far the biggest and most impressive document in my collection of old family diplomas and bears an impressive blue ribbon with a gold seal of the state of California, and it is beautifully hand lettered. By comparison, my college diploma is less than half the size with a stamped gold seal, and OilMan's masters degree, the same size as mine, looks like it was xeroxed.

It would seem that one lesson to be taken from this observation is that education of any kind meant more in 1892 than it does now.

What has happened to penmanship? We certainly were never taught to write beautiful calligraphy such as I see on my grandfather's diploma, or even to develop a beautiful hand as can be seen in the signatures on it, but we were taught penmanship. I can still remember my second grade teacher teaching us cursive by describing the movements of a bee above and below and curving around the blue lines printed on our practice paper. There was a dark blue line upon which the body of the word was to balance, with lighter dotted blue lines above and below it for the d's and g's.

We were also taught to write letters with the proper forms of salutation and closing. We wrote thank you notes, (especially to our grandparents!) We wrote to boyfriends, (where the closing tended to be something like SWAK--sealed with a kiss, and we dotted our i's with little circles) and we were expected to write letters home from camp (or self-addressed post cards presented to us by our parents as we boarded the bus). We had pen pals in foreign countries and wrote letters to friends. It was the way we communicated. I still have a packet of letters I've exchanged with a good friend, a historian, who lives in another state. She often speaks convincingly of the value of letters, even seemingly mundane ones. We joked about being the last people on earth who actually write letters to each other! I was fascinated recently by a box I found in the attic full of old letters written by family members many generations ago. Sometimes I didn't even know who these people were, but their everyday news, written in a faded but still beautifully legible hand, was engrossing.

Today, with the advent of the typewriter and the computer, we have almost forgotten how to write. Our signatures have degenerated into an illegible scrawl. It no longer represents pride in who we are. OilMan and I even used something called "docusign" for virtually signing important documents when buying and selling houses. A '"signature" was chosen for us--all we had to do was press "accept". To me, that devalues the importance of the document by implying that nobody is ever going to look at it again.

Nobody writes letters anymore. I used to write an email as carefully as if it was a letter, carefully proof-reading it before pressing "send". Now, with the advent of texting, communications have devolved into distant, curiously abbreviated forms of dialogue that would tell future generations nothing about us, even if they could be preserved. I think this changes the way we relate to each other in fairly far-reaching ways.

I still treasure things that can be saved.