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The Amber Room
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I possess several vintage fountain pens. I hesitate
to use the word own. How can one own something that was made when
Franklin D Roosevelt was president, especially a young nappy-headed
Humphrey Bogart doppelganger like me? Pens like my Parker Deluxe Parkette
with its Art Deco ball clip and fluted barrel and triple banded cap,
or my Sheaffer Golden stripe 350 with its sleek tapered lines and
warm brown and gold tones? I dwell in a far different era than the
one in which these fine writing instruments were manufactured: Weapons
of Mass Destruction, Katrina, Osama Bin laden, blogs, Blackberries,
streaming video, cellular phones, Podcasts, RFID, WiFi, global warming,
for goodness sake! These pens have been right there with us from a
time when we had nothing to fear but fear itself right up to these
times of duct tape and plastic sheeting, and I am the decider. I revere them as much for the history they represent as for their classy good looks. I confess: I adore them even more than bowties and double-breasted suits. They are cultural artifacts of a bygone era when we almost got it right. I know that someday these fine pens will pass on to another lucky soul. That's fine with me. That is as it should be. I hope he or she appreciates them as much as I do for their beauty, remarkable craftsmanship, and utility. Meanwhile, dum spiro, spero, they are my link to an earlier time before humans were trivialized and the world robbed of its grandeur and mystique by market, media, and internet. |
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I am part of this world with much reluctance. When we go out to dinner, I always take care to slip a fountain pen into my coat pocket. I've been known to idly twirl my Parker in my fingers while holding forth over martinis and steamed artichokes, or to scrawl a scene on a table cloth or place mat while nibbling on calamari rings. It's a good system; it yields a happy marriage and plenty of good work, which is all I want. Sometimes in my quest for good work I stumble in a rough patch. Then nothing except a legal pad and a vintage fountain pen will do to get me out of the sorry mess. That gold nib gliding smoothly across the lined yellow paper can be hypnotic, or maybe it's just some lingering after-effects of many mushroom trips. Beneath my goggling eyeballs a river of black ink flows across the yellow plain into rich estuaries of dialogue or the briny tide pools of high drama and low comedy. |
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Completed chapters are printed out then corrected by hand in purple ink, a kind of truce between the old pre-Windows world and the new. I leave the red ink for teachers and editors. The Sheaffer is the closest I'll ever come to a real seventeenth century Spanish rapier. The Parker writes with all the precision and grace of a Cadillac V16 gliding down a palm lined street past pink mansions. This is writing as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Cervantes, and Suetonius would have understood it. I can't believe I get to play at being like them. I can't recall the last time I held a ballpoint pen-except as a curiosity. |
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