J.A.Buffington: Professional Writer

Creative Writing

"Pencils"

©2001-2007 J. Beau Buffington

I was struck with the simplicity and complete practicality of the ballpoint pen the other day. I have taken it’s presence for granted many times in my life. But sometimes, I know that nothing can take this place of this simple 2-bit piece of plastic and ink—nothing else will do. From the time I was growing up and first made a crude writing slate out of chalk rock, to the days of elementary school when I would buy a fifty-cent tool out of the machine and have it taken apart and the spring shot to the other side of the room before the end of the day, to the drafting class in college when each mechanical pencil was an expensive, precision made tool from Germany, to graduate school when I started writing every thing that I did in pen (because I thought it looked more permanent and therefore more professional), to my return to the good, old #2 pencil because it was quick and easy to correct mistakes, my appreciation for writing technology seems to have come full circle.

I can’t remember when I first learned to write with chalk rock. It seems from the time of my earliest memory, I was digging this flat stone out of the creek bed below my house and imagining that I was a cave man writing messages to some far off person in some far off time and place. I noticed that the rock could be broken easily and fashioned into a simple, yet crude writing implement. I felt like an ancient scribe etching cryptic messages into prehistoric stone. Whenever my friends would come over, the chalk rock writing was usually one of the top three activities, just behind wading in the creek looking for crawdads, and skipping rocks to the other side. And when you got tired of writing on the chalk rock shards, the small bits were excellent skipping rocks.

When I was in elementary school, one reason I could always use to beg money from my mom was for a new pen. After I got off the bus and before the class started, I would drop the two quarters in the circular holes in the flat, metal bar and thrust it quickly into the machine in the hallway next to the boy’s bathroom. It made the most satisfying sound that rattled the entire metal box like a bass drum and usually belched out a cardboard tube with a shiny pen inside. Once-in-a-while, the metal bar would just jam in the machine and no one but the custodian could get your pen—or your money—out. You had to work quick…mainly so no one else would claim that jammed pen for their own. One time, my best friend Curtis Peters told me about finding a jammed pen and getting it out for free. But, that was an activity best left to the experts, as far as I was concerned.

In college, I took a drafting class for engineers. I bought a whole mechanical drafting set at the university bookstore so that I could start the first project. When, I unzipped the drawing kit for the first time, there was the mostly lovely aroma of soft vinyl. Inside, there were several-sized mechanical pencils and leads, a large white plastic eraser that wiped everything on the page clean, a smaller eraser stick for touch-ups, a brush to wipe off the crumbs, a precision-made compass with special leads to circumscribe potential arcs, and circular drafting dots that would hold the whole drawing in place. The TA told us that regular masking tape might tear the edges of the paper and I was too much of a perfectionist to even consider using regular tape after that.

After starting graduate school, I felt like every thing that I wrote had to assume that air of authority and permanence that only ink-on-paper would convey so I didn’t write in anything but pens for the first semester. Then, when I realized that the professors’ notes wouldn’t usually even fit on one page horizontally and that I would have to correct and edit my tables and charts “on the fly,” I realized that pencils would be the safest choice. I even bought some regular pencils that had to be sharpened in a machine and it was always a welcome break from studying to scout for new pen sharpeners in the library.

I read an article in the “Missouri Conservationist” recently about how to make a quill-tipped pen. In the article, it said that this method of writing with a feather was used for hundreds of years. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been originally written with quill-tipped pen. After this, I started to realize how many hundreds of years of writing technology had been condensed into a simple ball-point pen that could be had for 75-cents at the university bookstore. Indeed, this writing technology is the ultimate symbol of the accessibility of reading and writing for the majority of people in America.

Now, in the days of computers and word-processing, the writing technology of the past 4,000 years seems to be obsolete, at least for writing assignments. However, I still feel that writing in a simple notebook is the easiest way to take notes and to organize my ideas to write a larger paper. Ironically, however, I was caught without a pen in a graduate-level writing class yesterday and had to borrow one from a classmate. “Make sure you get this pen back,” I told her, “I am a notorious pen thief.” Sorry, Rachel, I hope your pen can wait until tomorrow