I never cared much for handwriting. For one thing, I learned to type when I was sixteen and never looked back. As the use of computers became pervasive, nearly every piece of information I wrote or received was typed. I took notes for classes on my laptop, wrote and received emails and set up reminders on my online calendar. Now, while I pursue informational interviews and work with clients in the courtroom, the computer is gone. My own handwriting, always the smudged, left-handed, half-cursive despair of my elementary school teachers, suddenly has to be legible again.
It covers the pages of my small purple notebook. Names and statuses scramble over the pages, uncategorized except by the way I wrote the letters, and where I put them on a page. I actually have separate notebooks for my professional meetings and my internship work, but somehow, everything winds up getting scrawled on the spare one I keep in my bag. So the names of successful, intimidating, high-powered lawyers are jotted down next to indigent defendants and alleged offenses, which in turn have private criminal attorney notes around them, inevitably in the margins. Recommended sentences and recommendation emails coexist with hastily composed cross examinations and closing arguments.
In a way, the penciled scrawl of my notebook is a tiny equalizer. The brilliant head of a huge firm is next to the kid who jumped a marta turn-style in front of a cop while he had weed in his pocket. Jotted down in the same chicken scratch.
Yesterday, I helped a client fill out a form. I do a lot of this. One of the county’s solutions to misdemeanors and crowded jails seems to be to punishment by paper. I show defendants where to sign, and give them multiple forms requiring their personal information, and remind them to press hard, because we’re still using carbon copies. And while I oversee the filling out of forms, I see handwriting.
I see bitter, hardened women create careful, delicate swirls my grandmother would approve of. I see big, tattooed hands dash out barely legible hash marks. I see writing marred by shaking hands, or resentment, or indifference. Sometimes, like yesterday, I watch an aloof, cool looking young man while he very slowly and carefully draws letters in the hand of a small child who struggles to draw the symbols without the benefit of the top, bottom and dotted middle line from the special paper we used in second grade. And I see him finally straighten up and meet my eyes, guarded, waiting for some kind of judgment.
I try not to speculate too much on what kind of life our clients have had, simply because it becomes overwhelming, and I think it is better to focus on helping in the way that I can. But at that moment, before I briskly went over what he had written to make sure I was reading it correctly, I wondered when he had given up, or been given up on. It seems like such a little thing, to be able to write.