On TJL and handwriting

Editor's note: my mother passed away on this date in 2000.

Anyone who knew my mother knew her handwriting. It was her voice. What she thought, she wrote. She worked through her thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams, and reflections on any writable surface. 
The collections of the notes that she sent to us and her unsent notes are as good as recordings of her voice.
She thought a lot about handwriting, as a mechanical process when she was in college, learning about how to teach handwriting to children, as a glimpse into the soul. She studied handwriting analysis and, in spite of the commentary by skeptics, knew that there was something in the way that we put pen to paper.
You'd think that she would have stood proudly at the side of people who lament how penmanship skills are being slowly erased in a typing and texting age and mourning the death of handwriting, how writers pen their own letters to the lost art. 
Or, maybe not, during the lastt years of her life, she embraced email with an enthusiasm that rivaled seeing in color what had previously only been in black and white. Here, one could send a note immediately and send it for free. The Internet-based mail system was inseparable from the Web experience. Google was just getting on its feet and she found gems in all corners of this new world.
The issue of archives becomes a problem, to be sure. I think that I have an archive of her email from that long-since defunct ISP. Some winter's day, I'll dig through a set of CD backups to see what I have.
She was also a fierce champion of young people, knowing that her world would not be their world. She saw that any reading and any writing, in any medium, was a wonderful thing. She would have sent Clive Thompson's article on the New Literacy, celebrating that someone else could articulate what she would intuit - "What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all."
She would have thought deeply when someone contended that handwriting was better for learning than writing on a keyboard or that cursive handwriting is better for hand-eye coordination than printing or keyboarding.  Legible handwriting is important, but at what cost. Wise people will disagree about the importance of old skills in a new time. Do I need to use a slide rule when there are better and faster ways to calculate sines and cosines? Bad example. She suffered through math. She was in college when I was in high school and I spent many evenings tutoring her in algebra. You get the idea, though.

So, today, we have her voice in these many notes. Had she lived longer, who knows what we'd have? And that's what she would have wanted, for us to think more about the future than the past, to remember, but to let go and move forward.