On Pens and Ink

Psalm 139: 23-4: Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

I don’t know how you feel about pens. I think they’re great. I even started a pen collection years ago. At its zenith, I had a Mont Blanc ballpoint which someone gave to me and a Parker cartridge pen I used in college. I had gone on to look at Waterman models from the 1930’s but gave up on my collection when I figured out pens, like weddings and boats, could be a money pit.

I didn’t always have such a good relationship with pens. We were exposed to writing using the Zaner-Bloser method, which used the ugliest pen on record. The business end was supposedly designed to fit young fingers while the other tapered to a point which had what looked like a small onion dome on it. Whoever designed this instrument of potential mayhem had never been around an elementary aged boy. When it came time for penmanship, we boys tried to stab our compadres with the sharp end. The pain served to keep our minds on how terribly awful our efforts at writing were. I was an “A” student otherwise, but for five years, my practice papers came back with “C’s” on them and the admonition, “Work on legibility, Danny. I know you can do it.”

It’s a good thing we didn’t have much access to the ballpoint pens of the era. A friend took one of his fathers and showed it to me at recess. Somehow we got the pen to leak all over us, ruining our shirts and incurring the wrath of our mothers.

I couldn’t write the way my elementary school wanted me to. I suffered through it and was happy to go to intermediate school where there was no talk of penmanship. I promptly abandoned cursive and resorted to printing, like every boy I knew. There was no talk of our doing this beforehand: we just did it.

About this time my father came home with a typewriter and I hunted and pecked my way through high school and college. In graduate school, I found I had to hand write my masters essay. We had a practice test, and I got the test back with this on it: “Nice work, Mr. Verner, but please work on legibility.”

I learned to type when my school acquired computers and we were required to take a course in programming using Basic, which couldn’t program enough to get anyone out of bed. But I could type.

About this time, I figured out the ballpoints had improved greatly. And ever better, businesses gave them away for publicity. My favorite pen is one given out by our mechanic, which seems to last forever and has a little squishy doughnut looking thing on the end that can be used for texting. With it, I could send messages at half the speed of a ten-year-old.

I generally have two pens on my person. Someone asked me why, and I said, “In case one fails?”

“Has that ever happened?” they asked.

“No, but it could.”

It seems to me that we are like the ballpoint pens in my experience. We start out messing up all over the place, but the God comes into our lives, and everything we do is improved if we follow God’s will. Because of his love and goodness to us, we grow in our spiritual qualities and are able to better to what God wants us to. Praise God for taking us as we are, loving us and making us into creatures that are even better than a 1936 Waterman. Amen.