A Pen of Digression

I have always been a writing instrument fanatic. I mean, some people see chocolate and their eyes glaze over happily. Me, I can get a positively sexual twinge over a really nice felt tip or gel writer. Is that sick and wrong or what?

Back in college, (late 80's) I had a passionate affair with fountain pens. You know, the ones with metal nibs and india ink cartridges. I could take notes until the cows came home, scrawling effortlessly across the page in beautiful loops and swirls of totally useless information that my profs thought was surely earthshaking stuff. The end of the affair was my inability to keep a pen from leaking. I'd buy new ones every 2 weeks and weep when I had to throw the old ones away. I just couldn't keep one for long before ink would start seeping out to stain my fingers (and notes and backpacks and innocent bystanders). With a terrible heavyness of heart, I gave up the fountain pen for the not so cheap plastic bougeoise tool that was Uniball.

Twenty years later, I came across someone discussing fountain pens that DON'T leak and it all came crashing back. Oh, how could I have forgotten?! There it is, that old feeling of weak knees and possible drool gathering at the corners of my mouth, my fingers twitching, longing to feel the sleek steel barrel and graceful possibilities of line, once more in my hand. Oh God, I have to buy another fountain pen!

Happily, the Japanese seem just as smitten with them as I used to be. The best have 18k or 14k solid gold nibs and are made by Namiki. Lamy is a close second. So I am off to Ebay, inviting that most torrid of desires into my life again: a bottle filled, brass hardwared, gold nibbed, endlessly gratifying tool of tools known as the fountain pen!

Take that, Hershey. Ink hath no calories!