Seeing Dad’s handwriting always makes me laugh a little. It was awful. REALLY AWFUL.

Some capital letters, some lower-case. Part cursive and part print. Some letters (see the lower case “a” and “g” on the sticky note) bore minimal resemblance to the versions I was taught in kindergarten at St Cyprian’s Episcopal School. The “a” had a square top and the “g” was basically just two little circles connected with a random line.

Mother’s handwriting, on the other hand, was graceful, legible and always carefully and beautifully executed. I remember wondering why the quality of their respective penmanship was so very different, especially since Dad was right-handed, and Mom was a lefty. Typically, left-handers have a more difficult time learning to write in a right-handed world. Thinking about hand placement with relation to spiral notebooks, ring binders, and school desks, the smudges created when the writing hand scoots along behind the trail of wet ink instead of running ahead of it, one begins to see the escritorial challenges of the southpaw.

Turns out, Dad was supposed to be a lefty too. When he began learning to write, he picked up the pencil with his left hand, but because of the bias against left-handedness, which has existed around the world and throughout the ages, (for an interesting perspective on this bias and its origins, see On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History, by Emory University Professor, Howard I. Kushner) Dad was forced by school teachers to write with his right hand. He described having his knuckles rapped with a ruler for using his left hand to write, a practice which sounds almost barbaric to my “Generation X” ears. (I say “almost” because corporal punishment via a wooden paddle, was still an accepted practice in my smalltown Louisiana high school in the 1980s.)

I wonder how my Dad would have been different had he been allowed to write with his naturally dominant hand. Would he have chosen a different career path? Would he have married my mother? Would I even exist? Maybe it would have made no difference at all. Who knows? But I do know that seeing Dad’s instantly-recognizable, wacky, messy, right-should-be-left handwriting reminds me of him and gives me comfort when I miss his physical presence.