Special Pen

     Years ago my father gave me a pen. It was a metal pen. When I clicked the push button, a ballpoint tip did not thrust from the pen's barrel; it was a small flashlight where the push button should have been, or where it usually was on a normal, plastic pen. A small flashlight the size of the push button, like one you'd see on a novelty keychain with someone's name on it (or everyone's name, when they're all organized together alphabetically on a rack, flashing out of sync with colorful letters, powered by little solar batteries, maybe. There's always a name missing. There are some names you can never find flashing on the novelty name rack). Instead of a push button, the pen twisted to thrust out the ballpoint tip. It was surprising. If you'd never seen a pen like that, with a little needlepoint flashlight instead of a push button proper and a spinning mechanism instead of a spring mechanism, you wouldn't expect it. Sometimes now I see a pen with an orbicular push-button-area, and I suspect that it might be a very nice metal pen with a little useful flashlight secreted in its design (the bright beautiful head), but it never is. Let me know if you find a pen like this, because usually I find that it's one of those touchscreen styluses disguised as a flashlight push button, disguised as a normal push button. I find this pattern of disingenuous push button posturing a little disturbing.

    I made a joke about the pen. Something like, "hey dad imagine if someone needed to borrow a pen and you gave them this pen and they clicked the top part of the pen thinking that this would make the pen click but it really shined them in their eyes." I often used to imagine childish scenarios like this one, in which somebody who was rude or bullyish would have their life marginally inconvenienced by some intervention of fate or roundabout cleverness. I probably thought that these little inconveniences exclusively happened to those who were assholes or sinners because I didn't really know how else the world leveled out between the assholes and the good people. It's pretty funny to imagine sinfulness as just being sort of an asshole or a rude person sometimes. That was my takeaway from church. Just kidding. When I was a child I was never embarrassed by the things I said, so I would talk about the imagined scenarios. Now I do not do that.

    After I made this joke that was not funny to anyone, although I wanted it to be, which is why I told it (I also probably didn't think it was funny but I would have laughed if other people did), my father told me sternly that this was a special pen, an expensive pen, a pen from his work, and that I would not be taking it to school ever and I would not be sharing it with anyone ever. I think I shut my mouth then because he seemed awfully serious, like he had known and I had not known or even been capable of knowing the importance of this pen. I agreed that I would only use the pen in the ways that he allowed me to use it–purposefully, silently, where nobody else could see it or ask about it.

    I think the pen had blue ink inside. I didn't use it very much because I did most of my writing at school, where I mostly used pencils anyway. I wouldn't appreciate the permanence offered by a ball-point pen until later in life. When you use an eraser to obliterate pencil jottings, you can still see the indentation left by the pencil tip. It's challenging to completely erase the markings. I would always use shitty erasers too, so it would smear the graphite all over the page and make a mess. Eraser shavings and graphite marks would stick to my hands; the words would be printed on the heel of my palm like when you press silly putty onto a sentence written in pencil. Then you squish and fold the putty up and the words stretch into oblivion.

    Anyway, I think the pen is still sitting around here somewhere. Hidden in a footlocker or elsewhere. I wonder if the little secret flashlight still works. I bet it does.