Learning to Write Cursive
Creative Non-Fiction from Robin McGrath
My son sits at the kitchen table, wielding a pencil as if it were a carving knife, learning to write with connected letters. His writing exercises are called Therapy Skill Builders, but the directions read like an erotic poem. He is enjoined to pursue fat bellies and loop groups, high hills and deep valleys, half hearts, left swingers, and flat bottoms. “Retrace the bottom,” he’s told. “Touch the egg shape together at its top, swoop down, look back at the first and let it guide you.” The instructions say “Close your eyes and try; get the feel of the movement.”
This boy of mine stops. He deviates from the directions for a moment and tries writing his name. The pencil point digs through the paper, deep into the surface of the wooden table. Twenty years from now, when I polish this table, I will still be able to see his signature. Back in the depths of his exercise book he is told to copy a series of short words. He writes them in three ragged columns and then painfully strings them together. “We mop up milk. Now no king was sad. Did baby walk away?” I look over his shoulder at his efforts. Not bad for grade four.
“Peggoty opened a little door and showed me my bedroom.” This was the first sentence of cursive I ever wrote, wondering who Peggoty was, where she got such a lovely name, and who the boy was, for it was sure to be a boy with a bedroom all to himself. “It was the completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen--“ (perfect because it was his, no doubt) “the most desirable bedroom ever seen--in the stern of the vessel“ (A ship! Oh, break my heart) “with a little window where the rudder used to go through, a little looking glass, just the right height for me, nailed against the wall and framed with oyster shells, a little bed which there was just enough room to get into, and...(this nearly brings me to tears) “and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table.“
Was there ever such a perfect room for a child? “Peggoty opened a little door and showed me my bedroom.” Was there ever such a perfect sentence, a sentence so charged with hope and promise, a name so mysterious and at the same time reassuring? There was that window, a little window in a little room, a room small enough to fit in a boat, with a bed that was most likely a bunk. As a child, I had often wished I was a pirate, for although pirates usually lacked legs and hands and eyes, they always had a bunk. And finally, there was the mug, a blue mug--blue like the sea--with a nosegay of seaweed, seaweed with a tangy, salty smell to make the nose gay. All the adventures of the seven seas were there, in a mug the colour of the ocean.
My son struggles with his pencil and exercise book. After all the curves and loops, the round bottoms and fat bellies, he only gets to write “We mop up milk.” Perhaps there were possibilities in “No king was sad,” but not the possibilities of a room in a ship with a blue mug and oyster shells, not the possibilities of someone called Peggoty, not those of the little door, the little window, the little looking glass, and the little bed.
Each time I struggled to write the word “little,” the room and the boy got smaller and smaller and the possibilities got larger. Traced onto flimsy paper a hundred times before being crudely transferred freehand onto rough paper with a pencil, and finally onto good paper with a pen, one legible page of cursive brought me a reward. The reward was a copy of David Copperfield, from which the sample exercise was taken, a world of adventure in a blue mug and an oyster shell, or in a signature gouged into the surface of a table.
About the Author
Robin McGrath was born in Newfoundland. She earned a doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, taught at the University of Alberta, and for 25 years did research in the Canadian Arctic on Inuit Literature and culture before returning home to Newfoundland and Labrador. She now lives in Harbour Main and is a full-time writer. Robin has published 26 books and over 700 articles, reviews, introductions, prefaces, teaching aids, essays, conference proceedings and chapbooks. Her most recent book is Labrador, A Reader’s Guide. (2023). She is a columnist for the Northeast Avalon Times and does freelance editing.