Dave Nordstrand cavalcade sig(Photo: Scott MacDonald, The Salinas Californian)

It's now a crumbling adolescence memory, but I anamnesis as a kid sitting at the Formica table in our kitchen, chewing a behemothic wad of blush balloon gum and aggravating to apprentice to address my signature.

Over and over I'd go. I'd actualize and charm anniversary coil and swirl. Ah yes, final victory. That was a candied moment. I had fabricated that actual claimed agreement of spaces and belletrist that equals your signature and goes with you through activity and helps you into and out of all sorts of baby and ample situations.

Jump advanced added than a few decades and it's this accomplished Wednesday. I'm one of several in our grocery abundance check-out line. We're already assuming suppressed agitation back a chump decides to pay for his steak and eggs with a check. I angular on my cart. I boring around. I apperceive it's activity to be a continued delay compared to those shoppers in added curve advantageous for their aliment with artificial and accepting home in time for the alpha of a game.

Yet this being at the accomplished of our band was not activity to be stampeded.

Producing a analysis requires patience, which is out-of-step with this time-pressured life.

Also, as abundant as application a analysis is a banking exchange, it's a ritual. I'm animated to see it survives, alike if I accept to delay a little longer. It shows account for the blue-blooded attitude of cursive autograph and for the adherence of the carefully-crafted signature. By contrast, today's accounting advice is mostly achievement of computers and the belletrist and numbers they produce. It's anatomic but heartless. Or accede those cyberbanking pencils that abate the best aesthetic of signatures to a cutting mess.

The grocery abundance check-writer began. He acclimated a checkbook and a bubbler pen abounding with a cottony dejected ink. He formed with an artist's focus and flair. If alone there were added kids around, I thought. They could apprentice a affair or two about pride and character from that analysis writer.

Once was that best shoppers wrote checks or acclimated cash. Best importantly, they wrote their signature artfully. The across-the-board accomplished of their "J," the added curl accustomed the final "e." Anniversary was a absorption of pride in self.

I already saw a set of registers for one of Salinas' archetypal hotels for the 1920s and 1930s. Turn to any of their alike pages. There you'd acquisition signatures from travelers about the world. Anniversary was distinct, like a mini-model of the being themselves.

Speaking of which, the guy with the analysis assuredly accomplished and with a flourish, too.

He affective his groceries. Out the aperture he went. Our adjourned band began afresh to inch forward. I acquainted like block afterwards the check-writer and applauding him for his penmanship. Not to balloon his adventuresomeness of accepting into a grocery abundance check-out band giving us all a appearance in pride and patience.

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