Trojan mail

 When I get a piece of mail with my address handwritten on the front, I get a little excited. A real letter! Then when I open it and see handwriting inside, I get even more excited. Maybe it’s from a friend! But after I find my glasses and start reading, I get pissed off. Someone, or some organization, manipulated me into opening that envelope under false pretenses. It’s not a message from a friend but a request for my money or my vote. It’s a scam. It’s a Trojan horse, sneaking junk mail into my home. I haven’t answered my landline for years—if you want to reach me, you’ll have to leave a message. I’ve never opened my door to strangers. And now snail mail is trying to trick me.

So it’s with qualms that I embark on my next round of writing to voters who don’t always make it to the polls. Incredibly, studies show that handwritten postcards and letters boost voter participation by up to 3.4%. I guess not everyone is as cranky as I am.

When I was 8, I spent a year practicing for the penmanship contest my elementary school held at the end of third grade. I came in second. And I still write a pretty good hand. So, qualms aside, I thought I’d be perfect for this task. But as I learned in earlier rounds of letter writing this summer, cursive is discouraged. In 2010, most schools stopped teaching it: the Common Core doesn’t test for it, so it’s considered a waste of kids’ and teachers’ time. That means the generation coming of age can’t read my beautiful script.

Relearning my ABCs at the age of 70 is hard! It’s stressful to restrain myself from swinging into a capital letter with a loop or joining one lowercase letter to another with a swoop. But I’m getting better at it, and soon I’ll be good enough to compete against an 8-year-old.

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