“I’ll keep score. You got a pencil?” my friend said as four of us sat down to play Canasta. I handed her the pencil that lay on my kitchen desk. A gray mechanical pencil. She looked at it carefully, raised her eyebrows, and then looked at me. I knew her question.
I chuckled and said, “Don’t you have your name on your favorite pencil?” My friend shook her head slowly. “That’s from my teaching days. I taped RAY (in red, no less) on it so when I misplaced it, I hoped someone would find it and give it back.”
I retired from teaching eleven years ago and this pencil goes back as least twenty years. It’s a perfect pencil. A Pentel Quicker Clicker with 0.5 mm lead. (I know these details because I recently lost one like it that I kept in my purse and I bought two new ones for $8.00.) It fits my hand perfectly and is always sharp. A quick click with my thumb advances the lead and I continue writing, not even stopping to lift it from paper, nor do I lose my train of thought. It’s written lesson plans in two-inch square plan books, to-do lists, grocery lists, column first drafts, and worked a few Sudoku puzzles.
Even as a kid, I had a favorite pencil. Yellow, a number two, and hexagon shape, never a round pencil that would roll off my desk. A yellow, #2 was all I knew so when my dad asked for a #1 pencil, I questioned him. A #1 writes darker and he could see the letters he wrote in the newspaper crossword puzzle better.
Through the years, I mainly used traditional yellow pencils. But when I taught elementary students, I stocked a classroom pencil holder with all sorts of pencils, including round ones with holiday décor, and a classroom student chore was to sharpen those pencils every morning. If a bright red round pencil encouraged a kid to write, so be it.
How did pencils come to be? We say a pencil has a lead core, but it doesn’t. An ancient Roman writing instrument, called a stylus, was made from a lead rod and the word lead stuck. Pencil cores are non-toxic graphite rods. Graphite was first used in the mid-1500s in England because it left a darker mark than lead. Graphite rods were initially wrapped in string and later inserted in hollowed-out wooden sticks, and the first wooden pencils were created. In the mid-1600s, the first mass-produced pencils were made in Germany.
A patent for mechanical pencils was granted in 1822, but the push button mechanism wasn’t developed until fifty years later. Eventually, metal and wood casings gave way to plastic and a holder for an eraser was added.
For the past six weeks, while I wore a cast or splint following thumb surgery, I missed grabbing my pencil and making a quick note. It feels good, almost a comfort, to hold this simple instrument between my thumb and index finger and write a grocery list.
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Susan Writes 