I find myself going on and on about things that don’t matter so much that it occurred to me to create a post series here on the blog where I write about and doodle the things that DO matter to me… and what better place to begin than with a beloved writing instrument.
There’s this fountain pen that I own that I keep in my purse at all times so that I can write with it wherever I happen to be. The pen has a story I will never know, a mysterious background. I only know that it belonged to my grandfather, who loved to write. I like to imagine that he could have used it to compose poetry, sign important documents, grade papers for students of his classes during his teaching career, or just scribble on a notepad aimlessly like I sometimes do. Many years after he died, I noticed the pen clustered in among several beat-up pencils and cheap ballpoints in a mug on my grandma’s kitchen table. She ended up letting me keep it along with its mate, a matching mechanical pencil that has since been lost. But the pen? The pen is magnificent. It has a lever-fill mechanism, which means that when it goes dry, you have to fill it from an actual bottle of ink instead of inserting a cartridge. I remarked on this seemingly quaint feature to my grandma, and she gave me a “Duh” look and said that’s how all fountain pens were made when she was growing up.
I think it is the world’s best pen because it is:
A. Fine-tipped so it skips blithely across the pages of a notebook
B. Still working, though very old
C. Iridescent red with gold accents
D. All of the above
The correct answer, of course, is D.
