The Accidental Gift

My father left little mark on the world – he failed to excel at several things. He was an Average Joe. But he wrote a beautiful hand. Just signing a check was a performance; a demonstration of exquisite hand-eye coordination, full-out showmanship, finesse, artistry and obvious pride at his ability to create a minor work of art in the application of a distinctive signature the equal of which no John Hancock or Donald Trump could ever hope to achieve. Watching him was sheer fascination. A little boy standing beside the desk – crowding in to follow that beefy right hand circling above the paper many times more than necessary– rapt as the pen finally dipped to meet the page with a push of body English, a flourish and triumphant full arm extension lift-off at the same moment he usually gave me a wink. That was a signature!

His penmanship was learned a hundred years ago in a small Northeast Montana school. The beauty and grace of proper pen work were as much a part of his early schooling as were spelling and grammar and memorizing multiplication tables – he told of sitting for hours practicing those loops and swoops and swirls and curls leading to perfectly formed letters and words, and by extension a well-formed mind. In the late nineteenth century, there was a golden age of penmanship taught by such luminaries as George Bickham and Platt Rogers Spencer and my father caught the tail end of it. I caught the tail end of the tail.

At Christmas time my dad would help us kids write our letters to Santa Claus. In that beautiful hand he would explain to the old man why it had to be a Daisy BB gun, or which of the American Girl selection was the only doll that would suit my sister that year. But his help only went so far; he insisted that the final letters had to be written by the requester.   So our childish notes went off to the North Pole. Dad’s handwritten prompts for us were thrown in the fireplace.

For many years I tried to emulate the elegance and flare of his handwriting.  A few times I might have come close. But by midlife, it had fallen away, wasted and neglected. Nobody teaches this stuff anymore; nobody cares. Nobody writes letters anymore nor values them nor reads them – email has corrupted the English language in more ways than one. These days I can barely scratch out a handwritten grocery list and even then only five times a day at the peak of the effect of pills that for a moment restore a steady hand.

Santa was sure to write a thank you note for the cookies and milk we left him on Christmas Eve. First thing Christmas morning there was Santa’s note written in his own bold hand – a joy to realize that something we had done pleased Santa Claus enough to interrupt his busy schedule to jot a little note.

It wasn’t until Christmas Number Six or maybe, Seven that I began to notice a similarity between the bold self-assurance of my father’s handwriting that I knew so well and Santa’s equally strong hand. Over the following twelve months, I occasionally pondered the meaning of this shocking discovery. Doubts about flying reindeer and chimney shenanigans never entered my mind, it had to be something else: Was Santa deliberately copying my dad’s handwriting? Had my father actually written the note dictated by Santa? Were the two acquainted? Was Santa Claus a distant relative? What a quandary.

In time the mystery was solved by other clues of course, which led every child in their own way to realize that the charmingly inexplicable needed no explaining at all. Yet there remains one gift, an accidental one, that has endured all these many years. In my mind’s eye I can see nearly all of my dad’s life flowing gently in a cursive all his own that never changed. He left me that and I am grateful.

Merry Christmas,