You gotta wonder...

Today I read a web posting that posed the question "Is cursive writing a dying art?"  It mentioned that cursive used to be taught from 3rd thru 6th grade, and now it is often only taught in 3rd grade.

I remember that we used to do what seemed like page after page of practicing cursive letters in what seemed like every grade in grade school.  It was always the same - the page would start out great and about halfway through you could tell that I was getting tired or bored.  Those capital "s"s started getting skinny and laying down!  I always hated getting those pages back and the whole last line was crossed out and I had to redo them.  Of course,we could all write pretty well and legibly.  We didn't have an option!  We had to write.  We also didn't have the option of using a computer or even a typewriter.  Everything was handwritten, and everything was cursive.

I think that it was sometime in high school when we didn't have to always write in cursive any more.  Somewhere along in there I stopped writing cursive all together except for my signature.  One of the questions in the article was whether kids today will even have their signatures in cursive... an interesting thought.  Every now and then I try to write in cursive and it's hard!  I have to take my time and concentrate really hard to remember some things... like the tricks of how to tie the different letters together,  and what a capital Q looks like, and that an "m" has three, not only two bumps.

I have tried to make it a habit as of late to write some things in cursive - you know - try to hold onto the skills that I have before they all fade away.   My wife is incredible - she has beautiful handwriting and her cursive is wonderful to read - a real work of art.  I think that there may be a guy/girl factor in this whole thing, too.  The letter on the left could have been written by me.

What about all of you?  Do you still write in cursive at all?

Poor Man's Pop Tarts

I finally found some information on what I thought I remembered... but I just couldn't remember exactly what they were called.  When we were kids, our mom had a tight grocery budget.  This was before the generic brand episode of grocery lore, but our family had a lot of the store brands.

Kellogg's Pop Tarts were what the other more well-off families had.  We had Post Toastem's.  They were good, they weren't Kellogg's but they were good.  There were a lot of different fruit flavored and frosting covered pastries, but the ones that were so cool that we loved - that we just had to have - were the Post Toastem Animals.

There were Munch-a-Berry Monkees, Tuti-Fruiti Owls, Peanut Butter Buffaloes, Berry Bears, Chocolate Flavored Elephants and Cinnamon Lions.  My brother and I both had our favorites - mine were the chocolate flavored Elephants, his were the Peanut Butter Buffaloes,  .  What was really cool was how the animals were on the pastries.  They were kind of "stitched" onto the front of the pastries, so we always ate around the stitching and had the shape of the animal left to eat last.  You got cool stickers that glowed in the dark, too!




Here's a commercial from the '70s for them...notice how the hunter looks like Cap'n Crunch's  brother... (can't figure out how to re-size this... :(

Putting Pen to Paper

 

Anymore, this is really just a saying.  When was the last time any of us really took pen or pencil to paper and wrote someone a letter?  I would bet that we all have written a bunch of letters in our time.  The obligatory thank you letters to grandmas, grandpas and in-laws for Christmas and birthday gifts; the letters to Santa Claus asking for all those special gifts; most of us even wrote letters to some elected official as part of our schooling.

 

As I shared, I’ve been going through some old boxes.  I ran across a bunch of letters and was reading them to my daughter.  I read one where my brother wrote to me when I was in college and asked me to forgive him for peeling out in my Camaro.  You see, he had dropped me off at a friend’s house whom I was riding back to school with, and had shown off in my car as he left and broke the tires loose. (It was a sweet car!)  This was in a letter I received about a week and a half later.

It hit me that this was the soonest he could’ve talked to me about it.  Of course, we didn’t have cell phones back then.  No texting.  Long distance calls were expensive – like charged by the minute.  My family and I would arrange to talk on the phone and would usually have at least 2 weeks between calls because it was so expensive to talk long distance.  This concept was lost on my daughter.  In these days of instant communication, the idea that it would have been this long before we could actually talk about it was unfathomable to my her.

Anyway – we could sure surprise some of our family or friends if we actually physically wrote them a letter and sent it to them in the mail…

Think about it… it might be fun just for the reaction!

Tuni Hat

 Toony hat?

Tuni hat?
Tuney hat?

One of the advantages of moving is that in order to properly move in you need to go through all of your old boxes and sort / clean / organize them.  I found a box of my old childhood items and I think I may have a few interesting posts as a result...

This is my old fishing hat.  I found it in the Cascades when we were backpacking one year - I was 11 or so at the time.  We had seen a guy on the trail earlier in the day wearing it, but we never came across him again.  So - I became the new owner.

My Grandpa on my dad's side had some a LOT of funny made-up words.  We don't know where he got them all, but they were all very unique, and just about the time you think he'd run out, he'd have another one in his hip pocket.  He called my hat a (you pick the spelling) tuni hat.

We all know that it's very common for kids to be attached to something growing up.  Favorite blankets, pillows, a shirt or pair of cowboy boots - I even knew a girl who says she had a board she took with her everywhere.  Well - I got pretty attached to my tuni hat.  Not only did I wear it at all the appropriate times (camping, backpacking, yard-work) I also wore it 90% of the rest of the day.  And - remember I was a tween and young teen in the '70s - it was a great excuse to not wash my hair.  Suffice it to say that it had its fair share of sweat, grime, grease and dirt over the years.

My brother and cousin wanted tuni hats too, so we could all be cool together, so they started asking for them for gifts.  One of our funny family stories is that of my Grandmother on my mom's side - a fairly proper woman - going into a JCPennys and telling the clerk in the boys wear that she wanted to buy a tuni hat for her grandson, and could he direct her to them?  I can still imagine the look on the face of that clerk because she was very insistent that her one grandson had one, her other grandson wanted one, and she wanted to buy it for him!  We still laugh about that one to this day.

Anyway - I eventually (I think around 11th grade) stopped wearing my tuni hat.  As you can see from the pictures, it's seen better days.

Did any of you have something - clothing or other - that was your "security blanket" growing up?