The Pens In My Life
The Bronx 1938
There it is lying on its side behind my Thesaurus to the right of my keyboard, a product of modern technology, my ballpoint pen. Its history began when the crushed, pigmented minerals slipped off the fingers of Cro-Magnon Man as he painted images on the walls of his cave.
My introduction to the written word in P.S. 61 was by way of a sharp, yellow Eberhard Farber No. 2 pencil connected to a quickly eroding brown eraser. The pencil was merely an introduction. The serious work of writing began with a metal nib pushed into a circular slit recess at the end of a dowel called a penholder. The ink supply came from a glass inkwell, suspended in a hole covered by a brass lid located at the upper right hand corner of my oak desk. We sat anxiously in our seats as a monitor walked to each desk with a large bottle of blue-black ink to fill our inkwells. The pen, a piece of green blotter and an ink stained chamois pen wiper prepared us for the Palmer exercise.
Miss Adelman, our teacher stepped out of the classroom allowing Miss Scraley to perform in her weekly-featured role. A crepe, navy blue dress hung from her shoulders below a tan, crocheted collar in the style of the teacher in a Little Rascal comedy. Black nurse’s shoes completed the ensemble.
Anticipating her arrival, I pulled my sagging argyle socks up to the knitted cuffs of my corduroy knickers then tucked in my shirt. In spite of her stale outfits that were fading from fashion, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell us that our socks drooped, our fingernails were dirty, our stretched red knit tie resembled a shoestring, or our shoes needed a shine.
Karl Small was brightest and the fattest student in our class. His penmanship paper was always spotless. Under his shirt, a disgusting, gray, woolen sweater was glued to his skin by the brine of his perspiration. It generated a halo of fumes that diffused in every direction. As Miss Scraley quickly tiptoed past him she gasped,
“When you get home Karl, if it’s possible to peel off that sweater, please give it to your mother, have her wash and hide it. Then, see if you can find it next winter.”
Who would dare to laugh? The exercise was about to begin. Her illustrations on the board could have been lifted and set into a textbook on the Palmer Method.
She snapped her commands.
“Up and down, up and down. Don’t stop until I tell you. Up and down, up and down.” No one dared to go on. This was serious business. We were stumbling over a threshold, from the childish pencil into the domain of the adult’s ink pen.
Miss Scraley paused, rested her chalk on the sill of the blackboard then the inspection began. We fixed our eyes upon our papers hoping she would pass us by without an embarrassing comment.
“Blots! Blots! You don’t have to drown your pen point in the inkwell. Let it swim gently on the surface, George.”
“Squiggly lines, Shirley. Rest your arm on the desk when you write.”
Shirley began to cry saying that she will never be able to write with an ink pen. Miss Scraley gently offered a handkerchief then told her she writes well but just needs a little improvement.
I was so relieved when she went by. It was one of the rare times I had no blots or finger streaks on my paper, but her passing comment was,
“Make sure when you get home wash those hands and don’t forget to clean under your fingernails.”
Miss Scraley returned to the blackboard. With pursed lips, she surveyed the classroom. In terror, my heels dug into the floor while my spine was compressed against the back of my seat.
“Now a circle”, she commanded. “Up and around, up and around, again and again. Don’t lift your pen from the paper, up and around. Stop!”
Barely stopping to catch her breath, she went on.
“Now let’s try an upper arc, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Stop!”
“Pass the ends of a lower arc through the ends of the upper arc, back and forth. Don’t press too hard, back and forth. Stop! Let’s repeat the exercise.”
What fate awaited anyone who dared disobey her? We never knew. Her every command was heeded by a classroom of terrified eight year olds.
How often did I look up and scan the upper walls of the room illustrating the beautiful white alphabet script on a black background wondering if or when I would duplicate it?
This was the torment I endured before we were permitted to write words with the pen. I wonder if scientists found a penmanship torture chamber somewhere in the Lascaux caves where Cro-Magnon Man practiced his warm up exercises before he sketched on the walls. Were there spots on his loincloth or stains on his fingers as I had when the exercise was completed?
Through genetic transmission I have a handicap that assured blue streaks to marbleize my paper. I am left-handed. As I wrote, my soft, outer palm and pinky trailing my script smeared the wet ink over the words I had formed. Consequently, I had the cleanest blotter, the sloppiest paper and the bluest left palm and pinky in the class. At the end of the lesson, the chamois pen wiper removed the remaining ink from the pen point. We flipped down the brass cover of the inkwell, placed our pen in the groove at the front end of the desk then anxiously awaited Miss Scraley’s departure.
Finally, in fourth grade we graduated from a dip-in pen to a fountain pen. I had a shiny, black, white-capped Morrison fountain pen. It wrote smoothly but the curse of the left hand persisted. Smudged letters and words continued to illuminate my writing and the side of my left palm.
One evening, while I was doing my homework, the bladder in my pen ran dry. I ran across the street to buy a five-cent bottle of blue-black, indelible Waterman’s ink at Mrs. Baretz’ candy store. Harry, who was a numbers runner for his mother was playing the pinball machine. When I asked for the ink he sarcastically interjected,
“What are you gonna do with that ink, Danny? Bring home a test with an A?”
“I don’t know. I brought home A’s when I wrote in pencil..”
The inkbottle had an interesting shape. When the ink reached a low point, its angular shape enabled me to tip it, thus allowing the few remaining drops to be sucked in by the rubber bladder in the pen. I reloaded my fountain pen to prepare for next day’s skirmish.
There was a problem with my pen. When the bladder was full, beads of ink would escape from its nib and leave mini-pools on my paper. At a distance, my smeared, blue-blotted paper resembled a Jackson Pollock monochrome. If I absentmindedly placed my pen in my pants pocket, its gray lining was dyed blue along with my thigh which absorbed the surplus.
In 1947, when I was a high school senior, Milton Reynolds found a solution to the random blots on my paper. He flew around the world in his private jet leaving samples of his revolutionary ballpoint pen at each stop. It sold for $19.95, wrote underwater and 30,000 feet above water. What was I to write under water, and why was I to write under water? How often, if ever would I reach 30,000 feet? If I did, my trembling fingers inside heated gloves couldn’t possibly grasp the pen.
When the outrageous price of the ballpoint was substantially reduced, all the students bought one. Although this pen did not produce blots, it did skip frequently leaving an inkless, shiny outline of a letter in a word I tried to write. I returned to the invisible letter and pressed harder. A gash left in the paper replaced the letter.
No longer was the ballpoint in the hands of the elite. Now, without skipping it can be purchased for a few cents in any third world country.
We have come full circle. Ads for fountain pens are found in the NY Times. Department stores have locked counters displaying an array of expensive fountain pens ranging from fifty to five hundred dollars. Antique dealers sell them for excessively high prices. Now I should collect ballpoints. If fountain pens have returned with their leaks, blots, smears and smudges, can a clean palm, can a clean pocket and a ballpoint be far behind?