The pen saga

Pens are important to me...I don't want every day pens made of plastic that roll off assembly lines in the hundreds of thousands. 

Even as a minimalmist, I want an ink pen that is beautiful and even better if it is has a memory.

It's also part of my philosophy of making simple things special. Some of that goes back to my reading as a teenager of Louisa May Alcott writing how special receiving a handkerchief for Christmas was. In this world of abundance (read waste) meaning is harder to find in simple things. Nothing counts as important.

My husband teases me about how I insist on using my beautiful pens even for something as simple as a grocery list. 

Most of my writing is done on computer with the exception of free writes. Somewhere within a pen, words that I want to say seep out with the ink.

I found the pen before covid in the photo above at a Christmas market in Ferney-Voltaire, France. I was with my husband, "French daughter" and her family.

I chatted with the man who hand crafted the pen. He was probably in his late 50s, with a full head of gray hair. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt that would not have been out of place in a Maine hunting cabin.

He described how that pen had once been a block of stone as old as the planet. He had used a machine to get the right shape, created the opening for the ink cartridge and attached the nub. Like many Frenchmen, he talked with his hands. His face kept breaking into smiles as if he were talking about a beloved child.

Picking it up, it felt right in my hand. The man produced a piece of paper, and I wrote a sentence, not the quick brown fox cliché but something about it almost being Christmas. I don't remember the exact words.

I bought the pen, although he had other pens made of different stones all with their own beauty.

Unfortunately, after three years, the nib broke. I found no pen repair shops in Switzerland, but online, I found three in the States.

Two didn't answer. Number three wouldn't send anything overseas. I asked if he would mail it to my daughter who lived in Massachusetts. She was coming to visit me in a couple of months. 

I mailed the pen along with an old-fashioned American credit union check for $75. 

Weeks went by and I heard nothing. When I contacted him, he said he hadn't gotten to it. I wondered if it had been a scam, albeit not a scam that would net much to the scammer.

My daughter's departure date arrived and she hadn's received the pen. When I contacted the man, he said it was ready for mailing.

Swallowing and dreading another delay, I asked him to wait until she returned. If, on the off chance he was legitimate, the pen should not sit on her front porch to be stolen before she returned. I gave him the date of her return and asked him to mail the pen then.

He did.

Too late to make a long story short, she received the pen and forwarded it to me by USPS. I tracked it from New York to Zurich to Geneva.

Today, I held the pen in my hand. It writes beautifully. I'll use it for Tuesday's Free Writes with two other writers. I may use it for my grocery and to-do lists. If I handwrite a thank you note, I'll use it, although I'm more likely to use Jacquielawson.com

Every time I use it, it will be special because of its feel, its memories, its beauty. It will have memories that I would never have had if I'd grabbed a plastic pen off a counter in some store.

Note: Check out www.dlnelsonwriter.com