Wife Like Me

There's something about the smell of newly sharpened pencils that gives me a nostalgic feeling of being ready for anything. Maybe it's all those years of taking bubble-tests with No. 2 pencils and getting good grades on them. Or maybe it's the opportunity to try to write something new and to be able to erase it if it's not as good as I wanted it to be. It could be all those times I forgot to bring my pencil and needed one, or the times that my pencil lead was broken and I didn't have a sharpener, that makes having several sharp ones available so comforting. Or maybe it's the smell of warmed ground wood that's inherently attractive. Whatever it is, I like newly sharpened pencils.

On the other hand, the odd unsharpened pencil in my cup of writing utensils on the desk drives me crazy. I need a pencil for a task, I see one with a nice, big eraser, I pull it out and it disappoints me again. Of course I don't have a sharpener handy, or I would have sharpened it already! "Handy" means "in the same room" to me, since I always have one in different room than I need it in. So I try again and pull out another pencil from a Halloween treat or a convention spiff, this time with a used eraser, but this one's lead has been broken. Not just broken off at the wood, but actually broken off inside the pencil, so when I sharpened it the short piece of lead fell out! Hmph.

Wood pencils aren't the only good pencils, and they can let you down by not being sharpened when you need them, as I already mentioned. Mechanical pencils have the best erasers. I like the wide white ones that are replaceable, but that I never get around to replacing. You never have to sharpen a mechanical pencil, which is a fair tradeoff for the sharpened smell. The satisfaction of clicking the end over and over, then pushing the lead against the paper to retract the length of it back into the shaft, then clicking again until your neighbor gets irritated and asks you to stop never gets old. And you can write in very small letters with a mechanical pencil. The writing doesn't smear as much onto your hand, either. I notice these things because I'm left-handed.

There were a few teachers in school who insisted that we write in pen. No pencils allowed! I have some theories as to why one would make such a requirement: the need to learn commitment, the teacher wanting to see the mistakes we made so that he/she could watch the learning process clearly or make sure we weren't cheating, wanting to grade papers with fewer eraser smears. None of these appealed to me when I was in their classes–I even went to such great lengths as to procure for myself erasable pens in rebellion. I don't like eraseable pens, and I usually use pens, not pencils, now. But I still like the idea of having a "bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils" on my desk, one like Tom Hanks says he'd like to send to Meg Ryan in the Fall on the movie You've Got Mail. I might get myself one this Fall, and maybe just smell it and look at it for awhile before Degen and I start drawing.

Tags: erasable, got, mail, mechanical, pencils, pens, You ve