My brain was more busy than a laboring spider, to cull Shakespeare, but instead of plotting a claim to the monarchy, I was writing a computer manual, hoping to ensnare user comprehension. Oh, retch, I need to take a walk.
A 10-minute power walk under a blue sky always revives my flagging intellect and castigates my soaring imagination. The unwelcoming cool wind was tempered somewhat by sunshine. Annie Dillard said, “There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.” I would reverse her adjectives — the Bostonian wind is a very muscular, brawny entity, and sunlight is divine — but in any case, the day was charged with energy.
I fell into step behind a young man with a pencil stuck behind his ear. He was a normal guy in his 20s, lanky, dressed in office casual, with cropped brunette hair and ear lobes that strayed a bit too far from his body. And tucked in this commodious rift was a pencil.
The pencil was an old-fashioned wooden pencil, painted schoolbus yellow, with a pink eraser burgeoning above a filament of green metal. The point of graphite jutted sharply from the plane of exposed wood. It was beguiling, a quaint talisman of dexterous ingenuity, a throwback to a time before men carried Blackberries and purses. The pencil was not quite full-sized. It had been sharpened at least once, maybe twice. Likewise, the eraser was rounded, not conical. Mistakes have been made.
I liked this pencil. I liked its essence, its modest stillness behind an ear.
