Pete’s Pen

The pen I’ve carried with me for over 40 years.

Out for a leaf-lined walk on a September afternoon, the breeze blowing the leaves and my hair around, a thought came to me, so strongly that my skin prickled. I bet I still had it somewhere, and when I got back home, I'd look for it.

When I did get back, I dawdled. I stepped into the kitchen to fill the watering can, and watered the plants. I topped the strawberries that had been draining in the sink, and put them in the refrigerator. I did the dishes in the sink.

Wiping my hands, I headed toward the back room, to the closet filled with papers, files and supplies. Three small bins of pens I'd been hoarding for many years, through many moves, sat on top of a filing cabinet, exactly where I thought they might be. I began the search. Rifling through the first bin, then the second, in the third bin I dug to the bottom and lifted what was there to the top. I found it.

A golden-yellow plastic base, a worn silver top with a pocket clip that said "Sheaffer", there it was - a fountain pen my brother treasured in high school. At some point, he’d abandoned it in the home we grew up in over a thousand miles away, and I, coming up four years behind him, had the chance to take it and add it to my collection. That would have been...probably 42 years ago.

I haven't used it in perhaps 40 years. Wait, no, I remember using it to take notes in architectural history class in college, so, a little less time than that. I have it solely because it had belonged to my brother, my cool older brother, and by using his pen perhaps some of the coolness would rub off on me. I could pretend we were close.

I wish I could call him and tell him I still have it. I wish I could text him a photo and we could laugh at our hoarding tendencies. Instead I will put it in the baby cup that he moved from place to place to place all of his life, the one where he’d kept his pens, the one I took out of his house after he died from a chronic, incurable case of alcoholism. And once I get a cartridge to get it working again, I will use his pen to channel his life onto the page, as if it could really ever work that way.