Searching for a good pen

The Art Supply shop on Erie Boulevard has a selection of straight pens for calligraphers. A straight pen, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a piece of pen shaped wood with a groove in the end into which you push a pen nib, the metal part of the pen that writes.

I painfully learned to write cursive with a straight pen, a nib and an ink well. By this I mean that I had to dip the pen into a glass container that sat in a recess at the top of my desk. It contained blue black ink. I was 6. Think about this.

It took me years to develop the swirls and loops of the Palmer Method script lettering that almost every classroom had displayed above the blackboard. Marred by blotches and inky fingers, my efforts to develop the lovely script that I saw above the blackboard and on Frances Fafolia’s papers were disasters. Why we didn’t write with pencils that had erasers was a mystery. It was a baptism of messy papers and disappointment that went on for years. I soldiered on despite my signature inky fingers and stained clothing.

My father had a pen. His colorful hand was the result of his trusty Waterman fountain pen. If you aren’t familiar with a straight pen, you probably don’t know what a fountain pen is either. You can Google it but a quick description is a pen that holds its own ink.

In those days bottles of ink were sold everywhere. Even the fountain pen users needed a reservoir from which to get their ink. The fountain pen had a bladder inside and a small pressure device that pushed the air out of the pen as it was plunged into the bottle of ink. When you released the device, the ink would flow into the bladder. Much less mess than using an ink well and a practical lesson about air pressure.

The only writing skill at which I excelled was using the blotter to sop up the errant drips and splats that usually accompanied my work. There was no such thing as quick drying ink. Both, straight and fountain pens, needed blotters. Every business, politician and worthy cause handed out blotters as promotional material.   Second grade girls might have a blotter from the Cargain Funeral Home, the Hot Bod Review, Kelly’s drugs or The March of Pregnant Cats.

There were desk sized blotters that covered an adult sized desk and blotter holders, some exceptionally fancy with leather corners.  There were half moon shaped devices that held blotter paper visible most often as a prop in a period movie where the heroine finishes a love letter and then blots it with her elaborately designed blotter holder.

The fountain pen that my Dad had was an aspirational device for me because we were forbidden, and I mean forbidden, to use one. According to the nuns at OLPH, a fountain pen would ruin our progress to Palmer heaven.

Far more evil, according to the same sisters of St. Joseph, was the nadir of writing implements, the ball point pen. If a fountain pen would ruin our hand writing, the ball point pen would take us to Hell or the writing equivalent thereof.

Some of the girls in my class, the more brazen iconoclasts, used ball point pens at home. Whispered description of their errant, if not evil assignations with Bic or Paper Mates, swirled around the noon time playground and despite all of the fears we had of malevolence befalling those who strayed from the ink well, the apocalypse failed to happen.

Culture change will win out. At some point, before I was in the seventh grade, I began to use a fountain pen. My Dad, ever enamored with the Waterman pen company, personally picked out a green marbled Waterman for me. My handwriting didn’t change. It was as erratic as usual, letters going every which way, loops too big, dots over the wrong letters  … but far less messy.

Today?  My handwriting never did reach what I think of as beautiful, but it is, for the most part, legible. I have a fountain pen, in fact two, one an exquisite rosewood Cross pen, boxes of Uni-ball fine line roller ball pens, two calligraphy pens with several specialized nibs and a bottle of black ink.

Each morning, I take time for a small pleasure, writing out my plans for the day. I have made my peace with handwriting just in time to learn that someone who has a bigger soap box than I has suggested that it is time to stop teaching cursive writing

Lined up against the quill, the straight pen, the fountain and ball points is the ubiquitous keyboard. Part of your computer, appearing on your cell phone and tablet, the keyboard eliminates the need for hand writing.  While the keyboard can guarantee legibility, it pales in the personality of a written page and it does require electricity which, if only in my imagination can be easily generated by the power and imagination my mind flowing down through my arthritic hand into the ink in my pen.