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Letters are beautiful. I have no idea what attracted me so much to them—maybe a love for books, and the words on them. But it was more than that. I loved learning to write. The principal of our elementary school, who as I recall was rarely without a cigarette (and a drink, I learned later) did take time out of his day to teach the second graders handwriting.

He had lovely cursive writing, and I imitated his script, elegant as it was. But typefaces seemed so interesting, too. I wondered why we made letters the way we did. I have no idea why, but I experimented with it. Maybe a lot of kids do.

My mom noticed my interest, and in seventh grade, she bought me an Osmiroid fountain pen with exchangeable nibs, and a book on calligraphy. I tried. Not so great. I tried again. Still not great. I was fairly convinced that I could never figure it out, and put the kit away.

Summers as a kid with absolutely nothing to do are some combination of death and living. Boredom and freedom mix in such a way that after the excitement of not having to get up for school gets old, something has to happen or wars begin. For some reason, the summer after seventh grade, I decided not to fight my brother—maybe he had a lot of friends that year. Instead, I started riding my bike to the pool every night and swimming laps for an hour. I did this every night, and came home and had ice cream and wore sweatshirts in the air conditioning. Something about the chlorine and the monotony of going back and forth underwater was so satisfying. It was the perfect time to get the pens out, and I did.

I kept working at it, and finally found some success. My mom’s friend, who displayed her artwork occasionally, started hiring me to make signs. Other people ordered poems, sayings, documents of various sorts. I decided to be an artist. When I got to high school, we were fortunate enough to have eight separate art studios, and a full-year class of rotations to try out everything. I found that every other medium came as slowly to me as the calligraphy, but if it could be studied, I could usually develop some skill. Still, I always went back to the letters, switched pens, tried new methods, read more books, developed it. The papers I find now are glorious, the pens magnificent, the inks gorgeous. What a treat! It makes me want to buy sealing wax.

What made me enjoy calligraphy was not so much the product I made, although I did find great satisfaction in a well-accomplished feat. I loved the practice. I loved the repetition, the concentration that was necessary, but the appreciation for each and every contemplative stroke of the pen. It was something so beautiful, and it calmed me—a nervous preteen, then teenager—as much as the swimming did. I found myself not exactly thinking, mind wandering, when I was doing both these things, but simply present. Indeed, if I let myself think too much, I skipped a line, or a lane. I missed a letter or a word, or ran into a wall or another person. Many occupations have patron saints, but scribes get a demon: Titivillus, there to strike when attention wanders. I have never heard of such a thing for lap swimmers, but maybe it was not considered an occupation when the demons were getting their job assignments.

I tried Chinese calligraphy once, for maybe six classes. I loved it, but was lousy at that first attempt. I bought some brushes, an ink block, rice paper. Sumi-e had its method, bamboo, plum, but was in my twenties and didn’t have time for the requisite state of boredom to learn it well. There is something to be said for not being busy. Still, I enjoyed it, and just recently, I tried t’ai chi. It seemed similar, like drawing characters, moving brush on page, creating, and being.

It had been years since I took out my pens when I finally did. My skills now seem a bit rusty, but retrievable. I had forgotten the place the letters take me, the way things I copied became imprinted on my soul. For years, I pulled books off the shelves to find poems, and there were two I came to love in that time, both by Dylan Thomas. The anthology in the living room had “Fern Hill” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night…” Both poems remain, almost word for word, those words, words that in the latter I scarcely understood as I do now. My favorite to copy of the two was “Fern Hill,” with its varying line lengths, and the language, so beautiful. Then, later, when I learned more French, Apollinaire, “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine/ Et nos amours…” More things I didn’t understand then, but stuck in my mind, still, as the letters still are and always will be.

Out of the living word
Come flower, serpent and bird.

All things that swim or fly
Or go upon the ground,
All shapes that breath can cry
Into the sinews of sound,
That growth can make abound
In the river of the eye
Till speech is three-ply
And the truth triply wound.

Out of the living word
Come flower, serpent and bird.

–Howard Nemerov,
“Book of Kells”

I was reminded this morning that I should have awakened in Dublin. Yes, I was going to go, but certain circumstances short-circuited my plans for this year. So instead of interviewing public health officials about services for children with mental health issues, this morning I found myself riding my bicycle down 135, west of Wellesley, half regretting on a couple of hills that I hadn’t gone on a shorter ride before I get used to doing this again, but loving the pedals and the wind.

I used to ride everywhere. It was great in Boulder, the one place I was more likely to get hit by another bike than by a car, the one place where police on bikes actually stop speeders. On bikes. So, if Boulder was a great place to ride, my own hometown stank. And yet, I reached a level of obsession about it there on my clunky old bike that was something like the laps I swam, and the verses I copied in calligraphy. It seems odd—I was in high school at the time—but I found great solace in repetitive things. It may have been some early effort to control one thing around the chaos that inevitably seems to track me down. Perhaps.

I was looking forward to seeing Dublin, absorbing the lyrical sounds of the street, but I’ll do it sometime soon. I have to. For one thing, I would like to work on my degree there. For another thing, I remembered that Trinity College holds one of the treasures that I have always wanted to see: The Book of Kells.

I have always loved typefaces, from the time I was very little. It was that love that led me to pen and ink, copying letters, words, creating something from them, from the way they looked. I disliked the original verse given for practice by the writer of the calligraphy instruction book I had gotten for my thirteenth birthday, so I went searching on the shelves at home. My mom, avid reader that she is, had more prose than poetry. A collection of Shakespeare sonnets was fine, but too square for me to make interesting on a page. It was in some sort of anthology of English verse that I searched for something sing-songy, something that sounded sweet and varied to my fourteen-year-old mind. I discovered Dylan Thomas. The lines ring so different to me now; back then I just thought they were pretty, and filled the page nicely. Now, I read “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” and it seems all too relevant. But then, then, I just copied beautiful words, finding the shapes that suited them best.

The style I preferred for the Dylan Thomas poems was a rounded, simple one that still appeals to me. It does look Celtic, suitable for a Welsh poet. It is actually quite similar to the script I would have seen in the Book of Kells. But I left my words simple then.

My peculiar fascination with illuminated manuscripts grew as I learned more about them, and sat copying, cursing the wrong stroke that occasionally ruined a day’s work when my mind wandered. I learned, in Edward Docx’s novel, The Calligrapher, that there is a patron demon—not a saint—of calligraphy. Titivillus apparently waits for inattention to strike the scribe. I can imagine the monks wary of him, in the intricately detailed work they did, half methodical, half fanciful as the initials took on lives of their own through the creatures that came to inhabit them. I admired the illuminations so, tried something like it at times, but not often. I know nothing of goldleafing, can draw only moderately well when I try, and had no sense of when to stop. My letters grew like vines down the page, wrecking the effect. But it was fun to try.

Today, on my bicycle, it was not calligraphy that I was thinking about. It was Howard Nemerov. I remembered the poem about the Book of Kells from years ago, years when I was a transfer student and he was a resident poet, both of us passing one another daily at ungodly hours of the morning. He seemed to enjoy being up then; I had to go to class. I did enjoy walking at that hour, tired though I always seemed to be, but finding time to drink coffee.

One day, I said hello, as I always did before I knew who he was. Someone told me once, and it occurred to me that someone had given me a book of his poems. So, the next day, I asked Howard Nemerov if he would mind signing my book. He told me that he would be honored to do so, and that I should meet him at his office the next day.

The next day arrived, and I took the book in, searching through the English department for the office number he had told me. He was there, as promised, and took the book.

“I don’t know what happened, but the title page is stuck,” he said, easing it open. When he did, we saw that the book had already been signed.

Not only had it been signed, but the previous owner of the book—it was apparent now that there had been one—had altered the title. Instead of “Collected poems,” it read, “Collected shit…”

I may have turned several shades of red to purple—I could never know. I did see the look of surprise and momentary sadness on the poet’s face. ”Well,” he said, “we all have our critics.” He signed the book on another page, and handed it back to me.

I remember nothing of how I got out of his office, although I imagine it was quickly, or what I did at that point, but I do still have the book. When Nemerov died, stories from his students appeared in papers around town. He helped budding writers and English majors, patient, though critical himself, it seems. I never knew. But I do like the images of his “Book of Kells.” It suits the work well. I may have thought of it if I had gone to Dublin this week. But of course, anytime I see Nemerov’s poems now, I always think of the incident. I wonder what he thought. I do know what I like to think. I like to think that maybe that five-minute encounter was good for some story, some laugh at a mortified early-morning undergraduate.