a love story (with penmanship)

scene - third grade: the bang & hiss from the silver radiator in the back of the room. the scent of wet wool from our mittens all lined up, waiting for afternoon recess. a yellow sharpened pencil. a clean sheet of paper traced with two blue and one red stitched line. the small scratch of pencil on paper. my head bowed over the page. the pink eraser. a gold star.

i have always been in love with penmanship, with writing & words on a page. i loved the careful blocks of letters, the subtle bubble of the lower case a – perfection for a certain kind of girl – but then, THEN came cursive. and the delight that came from that palmer handwriting text in the third grade has never diminished.

cursive seemed to represent all the things that I wanted to be & do.

  1. be fancy with loopy letters

  2. be a grown-up lady 

  3. be able to write checks from a leather checkbook with pretty polished fingernails.

 i started very, very small in the building of pink letter day. I sold tattoos at recess for one nickel. i “borrowed” my mom’s gel pen from the phone message drawer and would do a single name in cursive across a bicep and felt the buzzing pleasure of collaboration. the customer left happy, back to kick-ball or fast-running or tether ball, and i would feel that i had done my bit to mark the world.

an otherwise ordinary thursday felt happier in the doing.

i love hand-lettering. and i love sweet paper shops with jingling bells on the door & in particular, i love the fabulous ladies of ephemera (the finest, finest stationery/wedding store in all the land) who let me sell my stamps and write addresses for their brides and then said “yay” to all kinds of ideas.

i love the fanciness of calligraphy and the humble beauty in the authenticity of a word written instead of typed on a screen. i love the scratch of pen on paper. the hush of the heat clicking on. i love the excitement in the delivery of just exactly what the person wanted. the bit i do to mark the world.

xo,

sara