One day, when I was in the second grade and Mrs. Schneider had us practicing our handwriting, I looked over at a friend’s paper and saw him write an eight the same way you might draw the two bottom sections of a snowman. I though it was the coolest thing, so I copied it. I felt like a bit of a daredevil. I was never one to go against a teacher’s wishes, but this time, I took the risk.
Many years later, I wrote a check to one of my sisters and it included the number eight. She saw me draw my snowman eight and laughed.
“That’s not how you’re supposed to make an eight,” she said.
“It’s the way I make it.”
“It looks like a snow man.”
“I know.”
I’d been doing it for so long that I hadn’t even realized how much my second grade habit just became part of my natural handwriting. I wondered if I could make the change back to a normally shaped eight. It wasn’t easy, but over the next few days, I made the transition. Mrs. Schneider would have been proud.
I started liking my new way of doing it better. Once in a while, when I did it the old way, my eight would look like to disconnected circles. But sometimes, when I did it the new way, the top or bottom half would look like it got squeezed in a vice (see the picture for a good example). So, I did what I usually do, I reverted back to my old way.
Recently, as I was writing in my trusty moleskine notebook, I noticed lots of misshaped eights, so I tried to change back again to the correct way of writing them. Now my brain is so confused that I never write an eight the same way. Years from now, somebody might find my moleskines tucked away in a box in an attic somewhere and if they are observant he or she will wonder why the writer’s eights changed so often.
But, a little mystery never hurt anybody.
