by Mark R. DeLong
In February, after a month-long consideration, I set my New Year’s resolutions into a five-by-five grid. I made a BINGO card—twenty-four resolutions plus the FREE space. It was my attempt to gamify the whole tired resolution process that I’ve failed at so well. Surprisingly the trick seems to have worked, at least partially.
One of my BINGO New Year’s resolutions was to write more letters. In fact, that was the first thing I thought of when I compiled my list and so it occupies under the “B”, one (to use BINGO-caller’s lingo). Activities have implications, I told myself, and “doing stuff teaches habits that transcend the things you do. Sure, some of my items look to-do-ish, but they can also lead to virtues.” That message headed up a post entitled “The Fate of Letters,” and I now wonder whether there was some subtle prognostication in the works.
Letter writing has begun to teach me some things.
“One thing about your letter,” someone told me “it’s so hard to read your handwriting.” He was referring to my handwritten note to North Carolina’s US Senator Thom Tillis, written as the new administration was winding up the wrecking ball and Congress sat in the bleachers, silently watching. “In the Senator’s office,” he continued, “they’d not bother to read it, I’m afraid.” (I was glad to have provided my readers a transcript.) And it is true, my handwriting is bad but not illegible. Scores of students have trudged through my comments squeezed into margins and in closing notes on their papers. Only occasionally have I had to “translate.”
Three of my recent letter recipients have commented (not exactly complained) about my writing, too. One, a physician, admitted his handwriting was about as scrawly and awful as mine. Another commented, “It was a pleasure to decipher your handwriting—not as bad as mine but a challenge nonetheless.” Even in a bewilderment of inky swirls and stabs, some readers were able to find a certain pleasure.
Another recipient sent me a postcard response, which he labelled a “test of the Emergency Handwriting System.” Read more »