I received a new journal book for Father’s Day. The cover is leather, with artful tooling on the front. The pages are heavy paper, beige in color, and they have guidelines. A leather strap is attached to the outer cover, and it can be used to keep the journal closed or to mark a place inside. It is an impressive place to store thoughts and ideas.
I received the gift from my son and daughter-in-law. My son, knowing my writing habits, wondered if I would ever use the journal because I do almost all of my writing on a computer or with my Droid these days. I must say that I wondered, too, what might prompt me to write in such a fine volume. I thought that I would have to conjure up some mighty heavy thoughts to log them into a book of such quality.
One of the reasons I seldom use longhand for writing is that I’m prone to make mistakes. I tend to hurry myself when I write by hand, especially when I use cursive script. When using an ink pen, I must constantly cross out and obliterate stuff containing errors. I don’t give myself enough time to do a decent job. I spend as little time as possible converting my thoughts to paper. When I type on a computer, I don’t worry about making mistakes. They’re easily corrected, and when they are, no once can tell there ever was a mistake.
I finally decided yesterday to give my new journal book a go. I opened it up and considered what I might write. I dreaded writing with ink, knowing that I would eventually make a mistake or would decide to make a change requiring revision. Suddenly, I remembered the existence of pencils. Why not use a pencil? Anything written can be easily erased. I have tons of pencils around the house, just waiting to be dusted off and put back to work. The proposition sounded reasonable to me, even if I came up with it myself.
Then, going one step further, I envisioned myself writing in cursive with pencil. My handwriting is so cramped and neurotic that it is hard to read, even for me. Suddenly, I remembered that I am a fairly good producer of block letters. When I was a kid, we called this method of handwriting “printing.” I have spent many hours of my life hand lettering block letters onto documents and drawings. I can make readable words and sentences and paragraphs using block letters, and they are even readable to me years after they are made.
So there is my solution. I’m posting in my new journal now, using pencil and block letters. Yes, it would have been nice to use a fine pen with fine ink, in a fine handwritten style, to log my humble thoughts and ideas into such a fine book. But, in truth, I’m a pencil and block letter guy living in a pen and cursive world. And if some day, someone purchases my journal in a garage sale somewhere, it might be just a bit more valuable if the purchaser is able to erase what I’ve written and write their very own thoughts and ideas. Such is the quality of my new journal that it could probably survive dozens of erasures and dozens of journalists.
