Now that my son, Henry, is past the squishy, not-altogether-there stage of infancy, he’s starting to exhibit glimpses and glimmers of personality that foreshadow the person he’ll eventually become.
He’s beginning to find things funny and attempting to climb every piece of furniture in the house. He’s developed the most curious of hands and will grab anything within reach just to hold it and, more often than not, to try to eat it.
Casey PhillipsAs a result of this burgeoning independence and emerging personality quirks, my contemplation of his future is starting to stretch further than just the next diaper change or feeding.
Eventually, I’m starting to realize, he’s going to join society. Soon, he’ll be able to communicate with more sophistication than a parade of raspberries and the raspy chuckle that his mother and I find endlessly amusing. He’ll learn to talk, to read and, eventually, to write.
It’s thinking about that lattermost skill that quirked my mental ears when I stumbled across a recent feature in The New York Times. The story by Perri Klass, a New York City-based pediatrician and journalist, examines the continuing importance of learning to write by hand, even though most people now communicate predominantly via typed, digital correspondences such as texts or emails.