Sunday Scribblers #113: Curves

SOME GOOSE

So, here is what I have to say about curves: when my son was in kindergarten and making his first efforts at cursive writing, he used to call it “curvish,” which I consider an ever so much better tag for a way of writing that most of us have given up long ago. I love my beautiful wife’s curves and curvaceousness, but I was so sad the day she understandably, and reasonably, explained to our son that the kind of handwriting he was learning was, in fact, cursive and not curvish. You know how some things you just want to continue, no matter how innocently misinforming they may be. I miss the innocent way he would exclaim over his curvish letters, like some little preschooler in Hobbiton.

I’m over the sadness—though I do still miss the term—and as long as my son will sing me “Christmas is Coming, the Goose is Getting Fat” with that little catch in his breath when he sings beyond the point of needing to take a breath, I will always be on cloud nine.

But what about that old curvish handwriting, in this day of word processing and myriad fonts? I gave up the stuff thirty-five years ago, developing that hybrid curvish/manuscript personal font that most of us develop if we’re not in the sorori-/fraterni-ty of second grade teachers whose curvish seems to come straight from heaven, or Rune-ville, at the very least. Not only can I not even remember the curvish version of certain letters, I couldn’t recreate them, even if I did. In my classes at the Instituto, we’ll sometimes gather round the board and see if any of us can still write a name beginning in Q. I find that I do love the Zs, upper- and lowercase. A few weeks ago, having finished her latest epic about a classmate and his traveling dancing tacos, The Divine Ms G informed me, in all seriousness, that she needed to develop a professional signature for her name; she found the curvish G problematic, and her first and last names (and made up middle name that I have given her—Garson, so you can imagine what her first name is) all begin with G, those curvish Gs looking way too much like a decal you might find at a truck stop in Dothan, Alabama. We labored for a good while: even LogoMaster NM failed, until Ms AB solved our puzzle and created a perfectly wonderful signatory logo for GGG. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre can chill now: we’ve got the future superstar ready for autographs.

A shout out to all you second grade teachers with your angelic scripts out there in Elementary-ville. Y’all make it look easy, but it ain’t.