In Praise of Writing

One of the things I like to do best is organize. I just love to start cleaning out closets, drawers, shelves, whatever, wherever "stuff" is stored. This has been a week for cleaning out. Today it was the kitchen, but yesterday it was the study closet.

I have accumulated several generations of purses and decided it was time to freecycle a half of dozen. So, prudent person that I am, I first went through each purse looking in all the nooks and crannies for left-over whatevers. Mostly cough drops or emery boards. But, in one purse--EUREKA--I found my Cross fountain pen that I had not been able to locate for years--I mean literally years.

Now, I love writing with a fountain pen. Oh, sure, I get blue ink all over my fingers. My pens, regardless of brand, never fail to leak on me. I take it as a sign of reciprocated love. There is something about holding a fountain pen, and writing with it. No other writing instrument adapts so thoroughly to the writer holding it. If you own a fountain pen, you know that you alone are the writer who can write with that pen.

Have you ever tried writing with someone else's fountain pen? If she has owned it for a while, you will find you cannot write well with that pen. The angle of writing, the pressure applied to the nib, all combine to shape the nib in such a way that the owner is the one who can coax the fountain pen to write.
All of which leads me to write in praise of writing. Not just the act of writing, not just capturing one's thoughts with writing, but the actual method of writing--thank goodness for fountain pens. Especially found ones!
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P.S. note the link on "stuff"--George Carlin does an absolutely brilliant routine on stuff--how we tend to collect stuff; how we can't live without our stuff; and how we have this pathological need to take our stuff with us. Of course, fountain pens do NOT fit into the category of stuff.