<p>Mr. Lucas, my sixth grade teacher at Public School # 131 AND Three-Quarters in New York City (I’ve changed the number to protect, well, I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to protect, but it seemed like a good idea) had a plan. We were all going to leave his 6th grade class with absolutely perfect handwriting, and he was going to make sure that it happened his way. You see, he understood that our current state of imperfection wasn’t our fault. It was a result of poor teaching and a lack of attention to detail in the earlier grades, and he, being in charge of us before we made the great leap forward to junior high school, was there to ensure the incoming students from P.S. 131 3/4 were not going to be found wanting. Or least not if he had any say in the matter.</p>
<p>Mr. Lucas was a former military man who fought in North Africa in WWII. One of his preferred activities was to regale us with stories of imbibing diverse varieties of African bug juice, thus making all the girls, including Stacy Schwartz who was already too hot from her new training bra (did they really need to be trained?), extremely uncomfortable. (Would “bug juice talk” now be considered a form of sexual harassment?) So his plan was simple: handwriting was to take place 45 minutes every day. During this time, beginning with capital “A”, we were each to write ten lines of ten perfect letters (100, all the same), in Roman military formation, and once we had accomplished this and had them checked by him, we would be promoted on to the next letter.</p>
<p>Now my last name begins with “A”, which had condemned me to the front-row righthand-side desk near the door for the past seven years, and made it difficult (but not impossible) for me to stare out at my favorite tree in the schoolyard. Occupational hazard, that last name beginning with A, and I was lucky not to have developed a permanent crick in my neck from perennially being forced to look left, or to have been permanently disfigured as a result like a galley slave chained in perpetuity to a single oar on the left side of the ship.</p>
<p>So, anyway, I did my ten lines of ten capital “A’s, all with my Waterman cartridge pen as neatly as I could (quite a trick, as most of the ink used to leak out all over my shirt pocket), and brought my paper up to Mr. Lucas’ desk, behind Johnny LoSassini, the class artist, who was onto the capital “J”s before I could manage his name once without a lisp. Mr. Lucas, pen in hand, began to put big red “X”s (capitals or smalls, I couldn’t tell) over a third of my “A”s, mumbling “Potato-head” or “Looks like a squished pear” or “Needs to go on a diet”, and sent me back to my desk to create another century.</p>
<p>Days, and then weeks went by. At first, I used to approach Mr. Lucas’ desk with some concern, hoping that my “A”s would finally pass muster so I could go on to “B”s. But no such luck. There were always potato-heads or beer-bellies or squished pears and lots of red “X”s on my paper. After about three weeks, with everyone else in my class moving ahead except me and my friend “A”rthur (wouldn’t you know it? and Stacy, still in training, was already on “P”!), I began to become embarrassed, and then ashamed. After six weeks, the shame turned to barely concealed anger, and then, maybe three months into this exercise, I discovered that I didn’t care anymore, and that it was really all right. After all, no matter where you were in the alphabet, you still had to spend your 45 minutes in handwriting.</p>
<p>In four-and-a-half months, and including more centuries assigned in daily homework, I drew a total of 27,923 capital “A”s. The reason I know the count to this day is that my friend Arthur and I started to keep tabs, and wore the number of our red-stained “A’s as badges of honor (I can’t claim to have read The Scarlet Letter yet, but when I finally did, I imagined a black, cursive capital “A” with big red “X” on it. We were, however, deeply immersed in The Red Badge of Courage, which may have been more on point.)</p>
<p>I never would have escaped capital “A”, except that in January, Mr. Lucas, normally a man of iron – a veritable Cal Ripken of the schoolteaching world – who ruled the schoolyard during recess like the army lieutenant he was, and without a winter coat, got sick for two days, and a substitute came in who didn’t quite know the rules. She, rather shapely as I remember, would walk around the room in a haze of cheap toilet water (I told this to my older daughter, and she burst out laughing, and the term still makes me inwardly smile), and as she passed your desk, if you’d hastily scribbled barely a line or two she would check your paper and you were on to the next letter. In two days, I went from capital “A” to lowercase “m”.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t remember if I ever finished the alphabet, but I do know that from that year forth, my handwriting has deteriorated into the inscrutable, and most of the letters between capital “A” and small “m” are a veritable wasteland. Oh, and what of Arthur, my partner in this tale of scrawl? He became a famous Park Avenue cardiologist, and I think he now uses a self-inking rubber stamp for his signature.</p>
<hr>
<p>“Cases of dysgraphia in adults generally occur after some trauma,” reports the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health. Hmm.</p>