What To Do with the Fountain Pen?

  

My Mont Blanc pen, purchased in the summer of 1997.

If you follow this blog--even in a desultory fashion--you know that I have, now and then, posted about the Mont Blanc fountain pen I impulsively bought at the Portland (Ore.) airport in--was it 1997? I think so--when I was out there for a Dyer family reunion. (Link to post about the acquiring of that pen.)

It cost more than I could afford, but I was young(er) and dumb(er) and figured I'd pay it off. Eventually, I did.

I've had to get it repaired a couple of times (not cheap, either), but I have to have it functioning. Otherwise, you know, the universe will implode.

I have used the pen for only a couple of things: writing notes to people (I do very little of that any longer in this era of messaging and texting) and taking notes for the books I will review for Kirkus Reviews, a 21-year gig I surrendered recently because of my unpredictable health.

So ... now what?

The pen lay immobile for a few weeks, clipped, as always, onto my portable weekly calendar (another anachronism, I know) alongside the mechanical pencil I use for taking notes on the books I'm reading for edification. (For some books I read, "edification" has no relevance whatsoever--so I take no notes.)

I read mostly fiction these days--though I always have some nonfiction going, too. Up in our bedroom, on my pile, is physicist Brian Greene’s latest, Until the End of Time (2020), but for my night reading I make only sketchy penciled notes inside the front cover--nothing detailed.

Meanwhile, downstairs, some recent nonfiction books have been piling up. Last week I finished one that I'd started and abandoned long ago (about the influence of classical writers on the Bard), and this week I thought I'd start a recent book about Emily Dickinson, These Fevered Days (Martha Ackmann, 2020).

And then an idea hacked its way up through the permafrost of my mind (a permafrost that, unlike that in the earth's far North and far South, is expanding rather than melting): I could use my pen for the nonfiction I'm reading downstairs!

Eureka!

The idea works in so many ways. For one thing, I reviewed only nonfiction for Kirkus. So, the pen won't have to make any "reality adjustments." For another, I always did my Kirkus reading early in the morning (several days a week), and that's what I am now doing with the accumulating nonfiction piling up in our family room.

So ... resolution!

This morning was the first day I began practicing this new routine (I'd already begun the Bard book with pencil notes--can't change writing instruments in midstream, you know?).

I just finished doing my pen-note-taking about a half-hour ago, and it was wonderful. The ink flowed freely and well, and I thought I could hear that pen sigh, At last! At last! At last!

But perhaps I was just listening to my own mutterings? My own grateful mutterings.