Sign here ...

Waiting at a Delta gate last week to board a return flight from Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, I saw a middle-aged passenger with an interesting approach to words as tattoos. Both of his forearms were covered with autographs in tattoo form. I couldn’t make out any of the signatures – they were the typical scrawls and clumps of cursive letters that people use to sign their name. The effect was powerful and striking. Although that autograph book of the flesh was not what I have in mind for myself, it still got me to thinking. What if the passenger in the bowler hat was a writer and all of the signatures were of authors he admired? I saw a different sort of signature today on a tour of the Pearl S. Buck house, courtesy of Linda Wisniewski, a friend and writer who recently became a docent there. Buck’s signature was in Chinese – Chinese was her first language – and displayed in golden stained glass lit by a fall afternoon’s sun. It was hard to miss, just like the passenger’s armful of names.