The Ex-Pens of Spirit

(Disclaimer:  Ok, yes.  This is a post about pens.  But bear with me—I actually do have an idea here.)

I found my favorite pen at home—my mother’s house in Northern Virginia.  The townhouse is a small one, and is filled with thirteen years worth of the kind of stuff a family with an inclination toward a breed of boredom that stems from a general suspicion that life is meaningless accumulates when it stays in one place for long enough:

Construction paper, watercolor paper, canvases, palettes, coloring books, markers, crayons, colored pencils, pastels, gauche, acrylics, water-soluble oils, oils.  A flute, a piccolo, three recorders, an Irish penny whistle, a Jew’s harp, a harmonica, a kazoo or two, an old guitar.  Knitting projects, beading projects, thread, needles, needlepoint, thimbles, embroidery floss of all colors, clay.  Two chessboards, Scrabble, Perquacky, Yahtzee, Sorry, Past Lives, Life.

The house is also full of exhausted pens.  It usually takes three or four trial runs on scrap paper to find a pen that still contains some ink.  (Maybe throwing away an empty pen, for my family, seems a gesture rife with symbolism, a gesture of giving up?)  The working pen I happened to find and accidentally adopt, tossing it in my bag on one of my visits there before heading back to New York, reads in white lettering on a translucent dark green casing: ADAMS-GREEN FUNERAL HOME AND CREMATORY, with an address, phone number and website.

It’s only held favorite status recently.  I’d reach into my bottomless tote, scrounging as always, and pull any one of the writing implements out, but I started to notice that when I’d pull out this pen, with the translucent green casing and the silver tip, something in me would exclaim, “You!” and I’d find myself grinning.  And then again, I’d reach in, and, “Ah ha!  There you are!”  And, “Bonjour! Adams-Green!”  And, “A.G.!  You little vixen, you!”

I like it because it reminds me:  Write something down because you are going to die.

This might seem like an unnecessary amount of pressure to put on oneself, especially if the writing implement is being used to write something like—I’m reaching for the nearest mini post-it pad as we speak—“Bob wanted to play Yahtzee & eat oatmeal cookies.”  But this note matters.  I don’t know how or why just yet, but I feel it does.

In “Body and Soul,” from A Short History of the Shadow, Charles Wright writes, “Write as though you had in hand the last pencil on earth.”  Right.  Right?  Right.

It’s important not to lose sight of this:  That what is written, even if no one reads it, is important, that there isn’t really any time to waste, that if you have something to say—even if it’s “Bob wanted to play Yahtzee and eat oatmeal cookies”—say what you came here to say, and try to be honest.