The Blue Pencil

One of my favourite things in the casita is a pencil. It hangs on a wall in a yellow plastic holder which also has room for pieces of paper. The holder looks like it is a commercial give-away, from the Mutual Supply Company on East Cass Street which is a few miles away, just north of the downtown area. That area has at some point been razed and is now fairly open with a few larger buildings. The Mutual Supply Company doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

The pencil is old. It is somewhat skinnier than regular pencils. Its eraser is rounded from use, and hard and cracking. It’s a very nice robin egg blue and labeled 1985 Census of Tampa, Florida.

What I love about this pencil is its point and how it was obtained. It was not sharpened in a sharpener; it was whittled with a knife. That’s what my Dad used to do.

Jane Wright is the owner of the casita, and it’s due to her patronage to the artiste that I get to come here and disguise myself as a matronly snowbird.  Her parents, Donald and Ruth, owned it before her. Don was an aeronautical engineer who graduated from the University of Toronto. My Dad too; John was nine years older than Don so they would not have met in school. But after that, who knows? They both worked in Ottawa. There should be a club for people who had an engineer parent. It’s a particular situation.

My Dad came home from work and after supper laid out a pad of quad, his slide rule and his pencils on the kitchen table.* I had a burr grinder pencil sharpener screwed to the desk in my room but my Dad never used it. He carried a pocket knife with a brown bone handle and silver bolsters on each end, and I remember how he pulled it from his pocket, put his thumb nail in the nail mark to open it up, and then used his thumb to push the blade as he whittled his pencil shavings into a saucer. I can feel how the back of the blade would make an indentation in the pad of his thumb because even though I have some great pencil sharpeners, (including the lovely Blackwing Long Point which involves a two blades and creates a very long elegant point) I sometimes choose to get a knife and whittle away myself.

Pencils were important in our house. My sisters and I knew that different projects required different pencils. Laurentians, the usual everyday coloured pencils, were quite hard, and good for printing captions on diagrams and maps. And you could print your name on them. Prismacolors were softer, with more delicate colours, and excellent for shading.

I have never used the blue pencil with the whittled point and don’t intend to. I just like catching sight of it now and again, and thinking about Don and John.

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*Later he had a study in the basement with a giant teak desk. His closet was full of wonders: old coats, a box of trinkets,  a bison tooth, the lovely colours of different shotgun shells; two plastic birds (one a Red-winged Blackbird) made from kits, and an Human Eye with lenses you could remove and put back. About twenty years ago I found one at a yard sale and put it together.