I was doodling...

 My west coast brother has informed me that today is "National Scribble Day" not to be confused with "Scrabble Day" which is coming up on April 13, not too far away.  

These days I almost always type or text my messages because my handwriting looks a little too much like scribbling. unless I write very slowly and carefully, which I can do if necessary.  My seventh and eighth grade teacher was big on penmanship.  I'm not that old but he did have us practice cursive using a pen dipped into a little bottle of ink.  Luckily, our desks really were so old that they had a hole in the front right corner just the right size to hold an ink bottle. I'm not sure how my lefty wonder spouse would have dealt with that arrangement.

But back to doodling, That same teacher scolded me once for scribbling (I say I was doodling not scribbling - if you're doodling you're drawing pictures and designs) in all the margins of my catechism. This was a Lutheran school and we spent a good deal of time in seventh and eight grades memorizing the contents of Luther's Small Catechism. This could become rather boring sometimes and so I doodled.  I was being very quiet, not disrupting class at all, and listening just enough to answer questions when I was called on.  When my teacher spotted the doodling I had been doing and called me on it, I pointed out that I owned the book.  I would never have defaced a school book that didn't belong to me.  I think he secretly sympathized.  He was quite a good artist himself.

This same teacher was the one who said that when we memorized a hymn, scripture verse or Q&A from the catechism we should know it so well that, if we fell out of bed in the middle of the night, we could recite it backwards.  Happily, I never had to put that to the test.  Interestingly, all that memorizing made it easy for me to memorize my lines during my years on stage in local productions.  

Thank you, Mr. Zimmerschiedt.