I’m trying to improve my penmanship, I really am. It’s an embarrassment to me, a burden on recipients of my letters, and a bad sign of the drift of civilization.

I want to abandon my urgent squiggles that stumble forward trying to keep up with my urgent, squiggling thoughts. The proverbial “chicken scratches” describes my squiggles only if the chicken is lost, desperate, terrified and drunk.

My plan: to emulate the wide, looping, almost joyful style of my father’s gentle hand. It takes a little longer, but it seems to allow for more thought between the words. I think he enjoyed the craft of it, embellishing his thoughts with flourishes that took their sweet time and enjoyed the journey as much as the destination.

He learned in the days of inclined wooden desks, back when time was slower. The upper right corner of each desk had a hole for an inkwell. I don’t think they had special desks for southpaws. Writers wrote with their right or got spanked in the hall.

They dipped their nibs carefully, loading them with enough ink to last a page or so but not so much as to drip. This took time and attention. It allowed a certain reverence for the sacred act of writing.

The teacher taught my little father to write loopy, so loopy he wrote, swirling out words like ballerinas on tightropes. He paused at commas, recouped at periods, put special effort into capital letters, had fun with the letters with swooping tails.

The form of the words meant almost as much as the meaning of the words.

Or so I imagine. I don’t really know, of course, but my first desk in the first grade had a hole for an inkwell. We were told there would be no more fountain pens. Even then, little I sensed the passing of an era. We were given pencils but we weren’t told why.

Fountain pens had a certain classiness, but pencils had their advantages. For one thing, if you made a mistake, you could erase it with the rubbery little delete button at the top of the pencil.

Pens, on the other hand, did not allow for error. One had to think ahead, not count on cleaning up one’s mistakes — a lesson I sorely needed and still do.

For another thing, everybody had to make periodic trips to the pencil sharpener, typically a Boston bolted to a wall. Classrooms were pretty quiet in those days, so the roaring grind of steel against cedar and graphite was a veritable act of defiance. One could get in trouble for joy-grinding.

And once in a while, the gut of the pencil sharpener had to be emptied — yet another opportunity for noise — bang-bang-bang-bang-bang on the inside of a steel waste basket.

(Another classroom chore that’s gone the way of grinding pencils: clapping the erasers. Oh what joy for any girl or boy to get to go outside and clap up a white cloud of chalk dust — a public service entrusted only to the dependable and well behaved, usually a girl.)

I think it was junior high school when they entrusted us with ball point pens. Again, they didn’t explain why. They (I’m looking at you, Mrs. Sparks) insisted, with unabashed absurdity, that errors be not scratched out but erased. In the case of ink, that meant rubbing a hole through the paper.

Only now do I understand that that was a lesson in life, a lesson far more important than penmanship or (nice try, Mrs. Sparks) diagraming sentences. The lesson: no matter how stupid something is, you have to do it the way they tell you to do it.

Now I’m back to fountain pens. I have more than I can use, some cheap, some classy, some from Europe, some inherited, some from flea markets and tag sales.

I have a few posted in the spots where I’m likely to write a letter. I try to give them all a turn. They all look so eager, so born-to-write. I don’t want to neglect one. I’ve never heard a fountain pen cry, and I hope I never do.

My hand is unworthy of these fine pens, their iridium nibs, their secret pasts, their highlights of silver and gold. They slow me down — not enough, but they’re trying.

They’re taming me. Stop squiggling, they tell me. Try loopy. Hold me gently and make me swirl.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@NLLibrarium.com.