Over the past ten years or so, pe
ns have sort of managed to fall out of my life. Grocery lists, appointment reminders, and personal notes have largely migrated from paper notepads to my smartphone. And I’m certainly not writing this post with a pen. I even do my crosswords online nowadays. There is one thing I do still regularly use a pen for, though, and that’s for signing my name.
I’ve always gotten an odd pleasure out of signing my name. I do, of course, enjoy the comfortable flick of wrist and fingertips as I scribble my name across a credit card slip or the occasional greeting card, but that familiarity is something that’s only gradually come over years of writing my signature the same way. It doesn’t explain why I would have liked it so much even at the beginning.
For me, my signa
ture has always been an expression of individuality, and all the more so because I got to choose what I wanted it to be. I remember quite clearly the thought processes and aesthetic decisions that went into that choice. The S’s in my last name were inspired by the way my mom writes the ones in her own signature: curvy and delightfully unlike the standard cursive forms drilled into me by my second grade teacher.
From there, though, i
t was all me. My K’s for example: a bold downward stroke with a swooping curve jammed in beside. And the initial M, in which the beginning flourish loop is usually bigger than the arches of the letter itself. I remember spending part of an afternoon trying out different variants. I must have been 14 or 15. I’d discard one attempt for looking wrong, another for being awkward to write. It didn’t take very long to settle on the final result. I’ve been doing it the same way ever since.
Since then I’ve seen hundreds of other people’s signatures, and no two have ever been quite the same. One of my brothers, for example, just prints his name in capital letters, using slightly larger caps for the initials. A college friend of mine, on the other hand, just puts a squiggly line with a completely arbitrary number of upward and downward strokes; a number that seems to change every time she writes it. My dad’s signature is surprisingly elegant; my wife’s can be surprisingly scribbly. Each is unique, and uniquely theirs. I love the signatures like I love the people that made them.
There may come a time when pens and penmanship are completely gone from our society. Even now, I seem to be “signing” forms digitally as often as not. And, certainly, there’s something to be said for the convenience of that approach. Still, I’ll be sad if that day does come.
I sign my name every day to what seems a mountain of forms and receipts, injecting a little something personal and individual into an ocean of uniformity. There’s something wonderful about that, I think.
Your comment about your dad’s signature struck a chord with me. My dad, too, had a beautiful, graceful signature. What made it unique was the fact that he had only his thumb and pinky on his right hand. As a young boy he had lost his three middle fingers and a portion of his hand in a farming accident. Despite this, he had a fluid, almost artistic penmanship. Thanks for the memory.
What a wonderful little story on a part of life I never gave much thought to. Thanks for pointing this out. My own signature has evolved to be as efficient as possible and so has little art in it. It is all function. Be interesting to change one’s signature. Wonder how one would go about that?