gozzterLeave a Comment on If I could write the beauty of your eyes

If I could write the beauty of your eyes

I am naïve I suppose; I assumed that the skills I learned in primary school were permanently etched in muscle memory -you know: printing the S the right way round without going over the line, somehow feeling the difference between writing and doodling, and always starting a sentence with a big capital letter. But times change, context changes, and the muscles I used to rely on have grown lazy with disuse. Or maybe it is my brain that is foggy now… Still, it is a worry.

I’m sure that QWERTY has something to do with it: a pencil uses a different set of finger muscles than a computer keyboard, Emailing requires different tools than a paper-and-envelope letter, and texting does away with any remembered semblance of spelling or grammar.

But time changes everything I think, and nowadays I tend to answer even seemingly well-meaning how-are-you texts with an identical reply-text, and an inquisitive Email with speedy return Email. I don’t want to worry the sender and force them to phone (or if it’s one of my kids, video chat) wondering whether I’m ill because I haven’t replied within what they consider a decent electronic interval. That I simply may not be able to answer in whatever format right away, or even be be carrying my phone while I’m on a walk, probably never occurs to them.

Fortunately, I seldom receive random messages (do they still use that word for Emojis?) from senders in their yellow leaves, and my speed of response is unlikely measured with anything but an understanding shrug from my elderly friends. And anyway, in case either of us is involved in any embarrassing activity, we would never use video even if we knew how. Something about an older person is usually in disarray at any given moment; it does not need to be unnecessarily exposed; there is no rush.

But if I were awakened in the stillness of the night by what I thought was an old man’s call of Nature, or perhaps a Whatsapp from my daughter who lives on another continent, I would definitely pay attention.

The other night, however, I was awakened by a single word in a dream: anabaptist. Of course, in my usual 3 A.M. confusion, I assumed it was a bladder-thing, and then realized that, no, it was a dream word that had awakened me. Although it was a word I doubted I would ever have an occasion to use, in my dream I was for some reason convinced that anabaptists were enslaved children who were forced to work, unpaid, aboard a ship. But all the same, I wasn’t sure. After all, perhaps it was bladder for ‘get up now’, but nevertheless the word seemed equally important, and I didn’t want to forget to look it up in the morning.

I decided not to turn on the reading light by the bed but tried to write it, and my interpretation of its meaning, in the little notebook I keep handy for just such occasions. I figured that even at my age and the dead (sorry) of night my muscle memory would guide my pen…

Although I did manage to fall asleep comforted by the idea that I had forever immortalized the word in what I hoped was readable school cursive, when I looked at the scrawl I’d written on the paper in the morning, I have to say I was appalled; I could barely decipher it.

So much for Miss Grundy’s insistence that I stay after my Grade 3 class, writing ‘I will not talk in class,’ over and over again in big loopy letters in my notebook. Stuff like that should stick, eh? At any rate, judging by what I could actually remember from my dream, I think I may have spelled it wrong; I’m not sure whether it was even important enough to attempt to memorialize…

Of course many of Life’s most memorable communications used to be delivered to me in cursive script. I wrote about one of them in an essay several years ago.[i] It concerned a letter from my mother about the death of my childhood dog when I was away at university in a faraway city. She had tried to phone me several times apparently, but in those days, we had no portable phones, no instant communication, so she decided to write to me instead.

I could tell from her writing, from the style, from the paper to which she’d hastily resorted, that there was something important she needed to say. Personal news, emotional news does not, even these days, seem adequately conveyed on a phone, let alone a screen. Grief requires something more: something more intimate…

Legible cursive writing clung to me through most of my usable life, though: it lasted right through high school, through university, and even through a pre-internet medical career (until circumstances eventually forced me to type my consultations onto a computer while I interviewed the patient).

In those halcyon days, apart from pharmacists, patients never sniggered at my writing skills. As a matter of fact, I think they rather enjoyed the fact that by answering my questions they could see and hear my pen scraping along the paper I used to store in their charts; I think they felt they were contributing to the remedy; it was all a part of being heard. They never asked to see my writing proper-side up; they just assumed their answers were duly transcribed; assumed that I, at least, could read what I’d scratched on the paper in front of them. I was the doctor, after all…

Either Time, or maybe Age, changes things however; although I don’t keep a diary, any writing I do is now on a keyboard of one sort or another. Still, as Miss Grundy used to say each time I was being punished, “Some day you’ll thank me for all this practice, G. Writing never goes out of fashion, you know.”

I’m sure she’s no longer with us, but sometimes, when the night wind rattles the bedroom window, I wonder what she’d do nowadays with a restless pupil who couldn’t stop texting to his friend at the next desk…

I think it’s things like that, or words like anabaptist, which wake me up on moonless nights -not my bladder, eh?

[i]https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2019/09/18/the-cloth-of-words/

, , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close