CURSIVE --- CURSE-IT!

LOOK AT THIS, 65 YEARS LATER.  Pretty bad.  But I did try.  I sat at  the table,straight up,good posture, shoulders squared to the table, the paper at a 45° angle to my shoulders, my left arm bent at the elbow and my left hand holding the paper steady.  I placed the pen through my right thumb and index finger and rested it on the web between thumb and index and aimed it straight back to my right shoulder.  I did not squeeze the pen with my fingers and I took a deep breath so as not to do too badly in this test, some 60 years after I had rebelled against this kind of garbage and gone on my merry way.  The reasons come later, but for now, I have to continue the narration begun earlier.  I had no sooner written the first vertical leg of the "H" of "Hello" that I realized that I was in deep trouble.  My rebellious ways were showing already.  The curve on top of the leg starts low on the left and loops across the top in counter-clockwise fashion.  "Non,non, monsieur Dion, ce n'est pas comme ca!" Good ol' sister Lucrece de Marie was telling me that I had done it wrong.  However, in this case, I'm the only living being in the room, so I smile and finish the capital "H" my way.  I was so nervous after having been taken down by the good nun, that the rest of the first line was not a raving success, as you can all see.  But hey, look at that "W", now ain't that a beauty?  In fact that whole first sentence is really not too bad.  The two first degree successes are the capital "W" and the capital "P", both of them appear twice and both times they are pieces of art.  The rest is the usual garbage that I have always had.  I do have some high samples of my handwriting, but trust me, you don't want to see them.
Many of you are familiar with the Palmer Method of handwriting in cursive.  It was a rather widely applied method of teaching your children how to produce legible cursive writing.  One of the reasons I rebelled is illustrated here below.

 Those of you who were trained in the Palmer Method of cursive handwriting are instantly brought back to the days when you were subjected to what seemed to be hours on end of these exercises.  I hated them.  All I wanted to do is to write something that meant something.  I hated these things and I hardly ever did then properly, causing the ruler to come down on my hand more times than I can remember in my Alzheimers' contorted capital function.  YUCHHH!  BESIDES, I had a perfectly good reason, in fact many good reasons, plural, why all this was totally insane.  If it was not insane, then the people who were foisting it on us were.  I know this because I knew what appeared to be thousands of people who did not write like that and who had very legible handwriting styles.  EFR Dion being the lead one of them.  My exhibit "A".  That was at home.  At school a couple if children joined our class when their parents had come to South of the Border, down USA way :-) Heee!  They could write well and they were not trained in the Palmer Method.  So,Why Me?  I therefore decided that I would write the way I wanted to write, no matter what.  Like a good prisoner, I did what they wanted me to do when they were looking and when the had a ruler in their hand and watching me.  The rest of the time, I was busy doing my best imitation of EFR Dion's handwriting style.  He had never been trained in the Palmer Method and he had the coolest handwriting of anyone I knew...Including Old Buzzard, Palmer.
Presently, I do as little handwriting as I possibly can.  My hands just do not do what my brain tells them to do any more.  See, it's easier to blame my hands than my brain, not being able to control me any more.  After all, that would appear that I am admitting to being insane.  Sheeeesh, we can't have any of that, can we?  So, I'm sticking to the unruly hands.
In finishing, I can say that I was going to make a lot of snide remarks about the pen points, the ink wells and the fact that I broke the rules this morning by using a ball point pen, instead of a dipping nib, but I spared you all of that.  Back when were being trained in this silliness, it was even against the rules to use a fountain pen, for goodness sakes!  If EFR Dion could use a fountain pen, why was it against the rules for me to use one?  This was just like the idiot rules about wearing short pants instead of trousers...  OOOPPPssss!  I think I got carried away there.  It's easy to do when you're wound up about the things that made you rebel when you were too young to do anything about it,except to sneak around and do the "naughty" stuff anyway.