CLEVELAND, Ohio — I’ll be honest: my handwriting didn’t come from ruler-wielding teachers in elementary school. It came from watching and mimicking my mother’s clear and elegant script.

Her cursive had graceful loops that people might not expect from a woman whose education was picked up at public schools in a colored town in Mississippi. They’d expect her handwriting to look like the work of somebody without proper schooling, something rough, raw and unrefined. It wasn’t, which is why I spent my boyhood studying it and trying to copy my mother’s handwriting.

Practice, practice, practice.

I think I succeeded.

I have graceful handwriting. Pardon me for bragging, but I can put a flair on written words that draws admiration from others, though few see it because I rarely use pen and penci

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