I’ve gone retro. I’ve gone back to using a pencil. Trying to, at least.

Pens have always been my luxury item. I’m not big on rings or bracelets. I’m not a shoe collector, and the odd days I wear a watch, it’s my ten-year-old plastic watch with The Phantom’s face on it, and the text, “The Phantom, the man who never dies”. I like watches, but I’m too cheap to get the really nice ones.

But pens, they’re reasonably priced, even if I don’t go crazy with them, either. I like to have a nice pen, I like to hold a pen, and a good pen can make any old situation a little more special. Of course, a nice pen goes hand in hand with a nice notebook. I roll with the Moleskines.

The first thing I got when I started school: a pencil and a wooden ruler. I still have the ruler, all dark and ugly now, with my teenage Gretzky fanboy writing all over it. In third grade, we were even taught how to write with ink. No quills, but not far from it. We had a special blue notebook for the ink writing exercises.

I got my first computer in 1984, but no printer, and with no Internet around, printouts were the preferred – and only – method of delivery so I never wrote anything long on it. I did use my mother’s old typewriter to write my little “books”, mostly “borrowed” material from previously published hockey books and Disney publications and I wrote my first college paper in 1987 on a typewriter, careful with the “Tipp-Ex” that I used to correct the typos.

But all the way through high school, I was writing in longhand. All essays, whether about history in Finnish, or about my summer vacation in Swedish or English, had to be handwritten, and then possibly rewritten to make sure they were legible.

A typical essay was around 400-500 words which I now, in the world of word processors (and freelance writing), know is about a single spaced page in 12-point Times New Roman font, but at the time, I would count the words in the first paragraph by nodding and pointing each word with my pencil – and then multiply that with the number of paragraphs in the piece.

I used to write letters and postcards to friends and family, and I remember the rush I got when I had got a postcard from one of the girls I had met during my language course in Oxford in the early 1980s. Letters were the way to communicate with friends left behind when we moved from Helsinki to Joensuu, a good 400 kilometers north, and with Terry, the Canadian exchange student who went back home in the mid-1980s.

Letters I have kept. Somewhere in the basement there are a few letters from Regina, Canada, where Terry studied and a couple of photos of a cat and a guy nicknamed ‘Sweaty” he sent me. There’s also a binder where I’ve saved letters from Janne, a guy I had just become friends with when we moved. He once sent me Bobby Hull’s autograph and I hope that’s still there with them letters.

The sound of a pencil on paper is a special one, too. Just now – or, at the writing of that, I have had to type in those notes – as I am lying on my stomach in bed, you can hear the swish, swoosh of my pen moving from left to right, and down the page.

Wife just said, “you’re writing a lot!”
“Yeah, I’m blogging,” I said.
She laughed.
“No, really, what are you doing?”

Of course, these days, I spend my days sitting and typing. I write emails, I write articles, these blog entries, I chat online with Wife and friends, and even send an occasional tweet into the ether. I have never written as much as now. When I face a blank page, my fingers do the thinking.

I know when it changed. I know exactly when I went from pencil and paper to a computer. Back in 1988, I wrote a few ads for my Dad’s store, the first by accident, out of pure inspiration. The inspiration came partly from within, but a lot had to do with the fact that I was playing around with a Macintosh, and its crisp black-and-white screen and numerous fonts – and the laser printer the school had – just made it so easy. I could write, delete, edit, rewrite so easily, and it looked good.

I have no idea when I last wrote a real letter. I know I did try to get back to letter writing in the early 2000s, but even then I typed them. Well, I typed a letter, then made a pdf of it, and emailed it. Cut the middleman called “post office.”

Then, even my notes went digital with Palm Pilot, and cell phones, and the occasional handwritten notes I wrote – like grocery lists – went CAPS. I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but I started to use block letters for everything, something I was taught to avoid when I was a kid. I lost my style, the one that my third grade teacher had called “personal”.

The big problem with note taking is not which method I use, the problem is to have the presence of mind to take notes when I get the idea and then remember to go back to read those notes. And this is where my previous efforts have come to a full stop. I need to make note taking and reading a habit.

Unfortunately, the lack of practice turned my hand writing from personal to illegible. While the advanced technology helped me to get around it – I now record all my interviews, or when on the phone, take my notes typing them in. It’s easier for me to decipher my typos than my hand writing – it has also made my downward spiral faster.

One advantage with using a pencil and a notebook is that I never have to worry about saving files. That makes it easier for me to write just a little, then close my pad and do something else. I have a very hard time having half-written articles on my computer.

Back in high school, I used to pull handwriting pranks on my teachers. I would start my essay using one style, let’s say all round and bouncy, and continue on the second page using a completely different style, say, a very low and straight one. Not one of the teachers ever said anything about that. Obviously, it wasn’t as funny as I thought. Maybe they didn’t think my ever-changing style had anything to do with an unstable mind, which I am positive Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes would have deducted. Wrongly, obviously, but still.

Handwriting used to be a sign of the personality. A text line moving upward signaled that the person who wrote it was positive. You could always tell the generation of the writer just by looking at their hand writing. I used to think my mother was kind of cool when she wrote her first name using a big lowercase a, instead of the proper capital A. My father used to take pride in his neat writing and when I see his writing now, I get a little sad, but I tell myself that he, too, has been typing too much.

Bottom line: These days, the only thing I write in cursive, is my name when I charge something on my credit card. And that’s just gotta end.

In the last three months, I’ve seen two things that have also prompted me to go retro with this. First, during a broadcast of an outdoor hockey game in the Swedish Elitserien, the announcer mentioned how in the old days, when all games were played outdoors, it was important to bring a pencil, instead of a pen, because a pencil never froze. Made sense. And then, at the Olympics, I saw ESPN’s Scott Burnside – excellent NHL writer – walk around the press tribune with a pen behind his ear, truly old school. And said to myself, “yeah, try doing that with an iPad.”

So, I’m doing this. This is the new me. From now on, I am that pencil guy. And I like my pencils. I bought a pencil sharpener that now sits next to my desk, with my pencil holder, a wooden cradle that looks like a Viking ship. I have a set of black “Penguin classics” pencils, with titles and authors of famous books, and I also bought a set of yellow, school pencils. I carry my notebook with me everywhere, and try to think of stuff to jot down in that authory, note-taking style. What the old literary heavyweights like Elmore Leonard never say when they brag about writing their books in longhand is that editing is tough.

I’ve been writing this in bits and pieces over the course of 4-5 days and don’t actually have any idea of what I’ve got.

Except a cramp in my hand.