ON A PENCIL by Lydia V. Arguilla

            I like to look at pencils displayed for sale at the stationer’s. I don’t buy them. I merely look at them.

            I was reared by a mother who was always in a state of harassment over tuition fees, textbooks, paper and soon, for six children all going to school besides eating and growing, and therefore needing to be fed and clothed continually. Buying more than one pencil at a time was unheard of extravagance. The notion clings beyond logic and beyond need.

            Someday, I may go to a stationer’s yet and treat myself to a whole box of pencils.

            The sight of pencils unsharpened, their erasers virgin and whole gives me a nice feeling. Freshly sharpened pencils, the wood showing clean and new delight me. I like them a little stubby never pointed and sharp. Sharp pencils look too efficient, no nonsense to them.

            There lies a stenographer’s pencil and mine. stenographer’s pencil is impersonal, always ready when it’s needed.

            My pencils never stay in one place. I find them in my handbag or between the pages of my notebooks or under my typewriter. Sometimes, they lie on any of the seven drawers of my table and when I need them, they’re never anywhere.

            So when I go hunting for a pencil, I either end up with having an orderly table and drawers or get sidetracked into reading an article or a story I had always meant to read some time.

            I can’t abide eraserless, hard pencils. With a soft pencil on roughish paper, my thoughts ooze out in a leisurely fashion that I never attain with pen and ink  or typewriter. With a pencil, nothing is irretrievable. A word or a whole line can always make way for a new one. Ink seems so permanent and final. Strangely enough, the typewriter to me is less permanent than the ink-pen, but less easy going. Where I can draw off with pencils, I must rattle away with typewriter.

            Pencils should be soft, and should have soft but firm rubber erasers. Erasers are like people. Some can’t remedy without messing up. Like hard erasers, they spread dirt without doing any good. Erasers should be hard but firm, leaving the surface good for a thumb nail smoothing and covering over with the right word or phrase.

            Of my first treasured possession, one was nice, soft pencil with a clip, and a cap to cover the point. A real, honest-to-goodness cap, the makeshift one twisted out of paper that seemed a kind of cheating as though one were tricking out a short pencil to look longer than it is.

            When my thoughts don’t push through easily, I bend over a wastepaper basket whittling away with my penknife, through superfluous impressions to the very core of an idea. Exposed, it is a simple matter to rub away its rough edges and bring about its point.

            Often I come to almost the very end of my labor to have my idea break, like the pencil lead, because the portion I happened to be working on was brittle and weak. So I whittle all over again. Or maybe get hold of a fresh pencil- or a new idea.

            I never can seem to sharpen a pencil straight. Just as well. It keeps me from finishing my pencil-sharpening too quickly, which if it is all I want, I can always do with the automatic grinder- an apparatus of much efficiency and no humor.

            I don’t sharpen my pencils too fine either it seems a lot of waste to scrape away so much lead when I could maybe work off the rough edges by writing directly with the dull point. Foolish parsimony for the too dull point fails to make the letters stand out cleanly, separately.

            Just so, an author obscures his theme- not paring away interfering words and phrases of which he is sentimentally fond. It is miserliness as inhibiting as mine with pencils, especially colored pencils.

            Colored pencils are exciting. Particularly, the kind that writes red at one end and blue at the other. Because I like the red better than blue as often as I can in the beginning, so that I can use more red later. A harmless little self- deception. But sometimes I use the red “just because.” Putting off fun now so you can have all the fun later, always seems like a good idea to the very young who have not known the hell and heaven can exist together on earth. Life soon knocks that notion out of them and they switch from red to blue and back according to mood and according  to need.