Who knew Palmer Penmanship would come in handy some day?

As an old, I have a number of skills no longer considered especially useful, as technology and/or tempora and mores have seeingly rendered them superfluous. 

Why, I can read a map. I can figure out the tip in my head. And I can write and read cursive. Because if there are three things I learned pretty well during my years served in an generally undistinguished (other than distinguished by its awfulness) grammar school, those three things are reading, mental arithmetic and cursive.

OK: I know that reading a map isn't the same as reading a book, but I'm taking a bit of poetic license here. And speaking/writing of poetic license, I can add a few more items to my "learned pretty well list." I can memorize, so let me know if you want to hear "O Captain, My Captain," which I learned 55 65 years ago. I can diagram a mean sentence. (Or mostly can. Do and and but go on dotted lines, or is it the perpendicular line leading away from and and but that get the dotted treatment?) And I can mostly keep a straight face when an authority figure is saying or doing something bat-shit crazy. Mostly. All learned thanks to Our Lady of the Angels.

Back to cursive.

My handwriting was always okay, and can actually be pretty good if I concentrate on what I'm doing. But in generl, as I've gotten older, that pretty good Palmer Penmanship has definitely slid downhill. I scratch out a note to myself, hurriedly add

something to my grocery list, and damned if I can decipher it a few hours later. Is that "garlic infused olive oil" or "Gaelic infrared OJ?" Hmmmm.

Even when I'm addressing a note or letter, I have to focus so that my handwriting doesn't scrawl off into oblivion.

Still, I rue the day when the USPS tells us we can no longer address an envelope using cursive: machine-generated or block printing only. 

The younger gens, it seems, have no use for cursive writing. What would you ever use it for anyway? You don't need it to text or create a TikTok. And, not that it's done all that much these days, you don't need it to read a book. 

There'll definitely come a point where there will be no letter carriers who can read cursive. 

Curses!

Cursive lets you write a note a lot faster than printing does. And how wonderful is it to come across something written and immediately recognize the hand that wrote it. (For the record, my sister Kathleen has the most beautiful handwriting I know, and my sister Trish has very good handwriting, too. And I love my cousin Barbara's handwriting, which is a distinctive style very similar to her mother's, my Aunt Margaret's, which I loved as well. As a kid, I preferred my father to sign my report cards, as his signature - Spencerian Script - was a lot cooler than my mother's, which was some form of Palmer Penmanship that I never considered quite up to snuff. These days, my "every day" penmanship is not all that unlike my mother's. Hmmm. And, after all these years, I still get a bit verklempt when I find something in my husband's handwriting.)

Anyway, it's good to know that those of us who have cursive are not completely obsolete. The National Archives, it seems, needs a few good men and women - and, let's face it, it will likely be majority women - who can jump in and help the Archives translate the documents in their treasure trove:

“Reading cursive is at superpower,” said Suzanne Issacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C.

She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. (Source: USA Today)

Admittedly, at first - ultra-quick - glance I thought that said "the field notes of Charles Manson." And my reaction was to tell myself that those field notes would be gruesome but mighty interesting. That was something written in typeface. How could I possibly cope with cursive if I can't even interpret typeface? But I brushed that interior objection aside, and I realized that Charles Mason would be mighty interesting, too, albeit not likely as gruesome as Charles Manson.

And how fun to be scanning the 1950 Census and finding myself on it for the first time!

Anyway, I decided that this might be a fun thing to do, so I went over to sign up. As promised, signing up is easy peasy, but meandering around in there is best left for a day you have time to meander. Once you get into it - and you're focused - I'm sure you can find things of interest to transcribe. But I kept getting sidetracked.

Manatees! A check written by Abraham Lincoln! It was way too easy for me to slide down a rat hole. I thought I could get more focused by looking in the 1950 Census for Worcester, Massachusetts. But ended up moseying around North Brookfield.

So, while I do intend to become a Citizen Archivist, it's best left for a day when I have the patience to figure out how to contribute.

And I do want to. What old doesn't want to keep feeling as if they're a valuable, contributing member of society, rather than just hanging around cashing Social Security checks and eating bonbons?

As for learning cursive, only half the states require it. What next? Why bother to even learn to print if you can use speech for everything? Why bother to even learn to read print if you can get all the info you need from a video?

This. Is. Not. Good.

Here's my prediction:

Schools for the children of the elite will learn to write. These Alphas will also learn to read. They'll learn to compute. Etc. Schools for the mid-tier Betas will also get a reasonable education. Maybe not quite as refined as that of the Alphas, but they may even learn cursive. Schools for the children of the disadvantaged - the Gammas, the Deltas, the Episolons - won't be taught much. They'll learn whatever the tech overlords want them to learn, which will be dumbed down everything. (And you think it's bad now???) Brains will form in different ways. Poor kids will be doomed to permanent dullarhood (if they're not already). 

I don't know about you, but I'm scared of the brave, new world.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you to my cursive reading and writing cousin Ellen for pointing out this story to me!