On the board

How far would you have to go to find a blackboard?

I was just remembering those wonderful items of the past! And remember the teachers' marvelous loping penmanship. Currently my boss (early 30's) has never written in cursive. I find that fact too astonishing to contemplate. Further, though he would print them, he rarely, if ever writes notes of any kind to people. And a letter? - forget about it!

As a child I was in love with blackboards. I never tired of watching teachers fill the panels with poems, songs, assignments, facts to learn - all of which we would copy painstakingly in our brown, lined notebooks. Most of those songs I remember in full to this day, so somewhere along that path from teachers hand - to blackboard - to child brain - to brown notebook the process took! Just now as I was preparing chicken for dinner I was singing "The Boy Next Door Has a Rabbit To Sell" - brought to you by the good people of Hinkletown Elementary School!

The blackboard was the total vehicle of communication. It was the teacher's hallowed territory but on rare honored occasions we could use it for fun. On rare painful occasions we (I) could write "An Idle Mind is the Devil's Workshop" 100 times before going out to play at recess. (Though I raced through it, I think I got five minutes of recess that day.)

And school chores involved taking the erasers outside and "clapping" them together, scraping them over each other to rid them of excess dust. We were strictly forbidden to "clap" them against the red brick schoolhouse for obvious aesthetic reasons.

Now we live in a world technological gadgetry and communication happens in vastly different ways. And while I rue the passing of blackboards, I absolutely mourn the passing of writing.