I’m taking comfort in the handwritten word

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 f ind 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.

As 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.

According to r e cent research, Klass says, developing print writing skills has links to better academic performance and stimulation of the fusiform gyrus, a region of the brain that assigns Casey Phillips linguistic significance to the otherwise meaningless shapes of letters. Basically, Klass says, “learning to write is the key to, well, learning to write.”

On some level, I find this thought comforting, because in so many ways, Henry’s formative years will be drastically different from mine.

He’ll never know a world where gravity waves are just a fringe theory or a Mars without water. Pluto will never feature in the mnemonic device he uses to learn the planets of the solar system.

Instead, he’ll grow up surrounded by 3-D printing and the ubiquitous use of virtual and augmented reality. Smartphones and gigabit connections will seem as remarkable to him as beepers and dial-up modems are to us. By the time he’s old, technologies we can’t even conceive of today will be utterly banal.

That bright and shining future is intoxicating to contemplate, but it’s nice to think his facility with the written word will start with the same exercises I partook in as an elementary school student.

Change is undeniably wonderful, but there’s some comfort in constancy as well.