The curse of cursive: Why Dave and I need forensics for our cookware

My husband, Dave, and I argue about whose mom gave us what. Evidently our mothers had the same cookware. We’ve got the nesting colored Pyrex bowls. We’ve got the flour sifter with the red knob. We’re never going to agree on the meat grinder – the kind you clamp to the counter.

My mom made roast beef hash with hers. Dave’s mom made corned beef hash with hers. We’ll have to bring in the forensics unit to settle it. We each want to claim provenance. We miss our moms, and we don’t want to let go of them.

“See that?” Dave says, pointing to the handwriting in the ancient and grease-stained copy of the “Joy of Cooking” with the sprung spine and loose pages. “That is definitely my mom’s. I know her handwriting.” I know my mom’s handwriting, too. They are identical.

They were both schooled in the Palmer Method of cursive writing, and not only were they drilled in it – as were we – but they also adhered to it. Dave and I are midcentury children. As a matter of policy, we didn’t do what our elders told us to do.

I didn’t, anyway. Dave, though, still has what used to be called “an elegant hand.” His cursive is regular and graceful. It impressed me when I met him. Somehow, it seemed that if a man had an elegant hand, it said something about his character.

As it turned out, it did. Dave learned the Palmer Method as we all did, and no doubt fell away, but then picked it up again in middle school. Specifically, he wanted to write exactly the way his mom did. That way, he could write his own excuse notes. To this day, although he is not otherwise an exceptional speller, he can correctly spell “diarrhea.”

The Palmer Method was designed to be easy and efficient. I also recall that one was supposed to move the pencil with one’s whole arm, rotating comfortably from the padded portion of your resting forearm. One was not supposed to move the pencil with just the fingers.

When the teacher wasn’t looking, we moved the pencil with just our fingers. As a result, our hands got crampy and tired, and our handwriting deteriorated.

Where a lot of us went really wrong was deciding we should be more artistic about our handwriting. Ah, wayward youth! No, we should not. My fifth grade teacher wrote with little backward threes for the letter “e.” It looked cool. Immediately I began trying to jam in little backward threes, and that took some jamming. They don’t really fit that well. Not only that, but they don’t hook up to any of the other letters. So every time an “e” came up in a word, which is often, I had to lift the pencil to get it started, and before long I was lifting it for other letters too. The Palmer Method “r” didn’t look like an “r” until I’d written it as a capital letter, only smaller. I believe “g’s” were the next to get complicated. By the time I was in junior high I was basically printing, only on a slant, with many of the letters miniaturized uppercase versions.

It was a mess. The Palmer Method sends graceful cursive gazelles loping across the page. My script looks like I opened up the monkey cage. I can’t read my own writing. I’ve kept scraps of paper on which I have scribbled something important, probably. We’ll never know.

These days, kids have mad keyboard skills but cursive writing is no longer routinely taught, although many educators are advocating for it again. Among other things, they say you should learn cursive to be able to write and sign checks.

That may not be the selling point they think it is.

Also, you should learn cursive so you can read other people’s cursive. This won’t come up often. Many children are cursive-illiterate in their own language. When Grandma’s handwritten birthday letter shows up with an antique check floating out of it, they are completely stupefied, but bless their modern hearts, they do know which recycling bin it all goes into.

The more compelling arguments include that cursive improves people’s fine motor skills and aids in the retention of information.

Dave – with his elegant hand – has retained a dead certainty about the meat grinder. He’ll go to the mat for that one. And I’ll let him do it.

But the krumkake iron was my mom’s. You can’t fake Norwegian.