Essay: Scribble, Scribble, Eh, Mr. Toad?

National Handwriting Day passed last month without parades. But the occasion may deserve to be celebrated, belatedly, with an updating of a part of The Wind in the Willows, a new chapter in the life of Toad of Toad Hall:

Toad gave up pen and pencil years ago, when he discovered the Smith-Corona manual portable typewriter. Toad loved his Smith-Corona. He played upon it like a flamboyant pianist. Now he massaged the keyboard tenderly through a quiet phrase, now he banged it operatically, thundering along to the chinging bell at the end of the line, where his left arm would abruptly fire into midair with a flourish and fling home the carriage return.

If Toad ever put pen to paper, it was reluctantly, to scribble in the margin of a college textbook ("Hmmmmm" or "Sez who?" or "Ha!"), or to write a check. Over the years, Toad's handwriting atrophied, until it was almost illegible. Who cared? Sonatas of language, symphonies, flowed from the Smith-Corona.

At length, Toad moved on to an electric model, an IBM Selectric, and grew more rapturous still. Toad said the machine was like a small private printing press: the thoughts shot from his brain through his fingers and directly into flawless print.

Then one winter afternoon, Toad came upon the marvel that changed his life forever. Toad found the word processor. It was to his Selectric as a Ferrari to a gypsy's cart. Toad now thought that his old writing machines were clattering relics of the Industrial Revolution.

Toad processed words like a demon. His fingers flew across the keys, and the words arrayed themselves on a magic screen before him. Here was a miracle that imitated the very motions of his brain, that teleported paragraphs here and there--no, there!--as quickly as a mind flicking through alternatives. Prose with the speed of light, and lighter than air! Toad could lift 10 lbs. of verbiage, at a whim, from his first page and transport it to the last, and then (hmmm), back again.

A happy life, until one day, Toad, when riding his bicycle in the park, took a disastrous spill. Left thumb broken, arm turned to fossil in a cast, out of which his fingers twiddled uselessly, Toad faced the future. He tried one-handing his word processor, his hand jerking over the keyboard like a chicken in a barnyard.

It was no use. There is no going back in pleasure. "Bother!" said Toad. He picked up a No. 1 Eberhard Faber pencil. He eyed it with the despair of a suddenly toothless gourmand confronting a life of strained carrots and peas. He found a schoolboy's lined notebook and started to write.

The words came haltingly, in misshapen clusters. Toad's fingers lunged and jabbed and oversteered. When he paused to reread a sentence, he found that he could not decipher it. The language came out Etruscan.

Yet Toad perforce persisted. It had been years since he had formally and respectfully addressed blank paper with only pen or pencil in hand. He felt unarmed, vulnerable. He thought of final exams long years ago--the fields of rustling blue-book pages, the universal low, frantic scratching of pens, the smell of sour collegiate anguish.

Toad drove his pencil onward. Grudgingly, he thought, This is rather interesting. His handwriting, spasmodic at first, began to settle after a time into rhythmic, regular strokes, growing stronger, like an oarsman on a long haul.