The Demise of the Pencil

Did you ever stop to think of what’s become of the pencil?  I remember always needing them for school.  Remember when you needed to keep three pencils sharpened at all times?  …Or when, at the beginning of the class, or before school began, you waited in  a long line  to sharpen your pencils for the day?  …And the pencil sharpener which was attached to the wall would grind the yellow wooden pencils as you twirled your heart out, round and round,, and periodically took the pencil out of the sharpener to carefully examine the point. Was it as sharp as it possibly could be?  Who has a pencil sharpener now?  Even the automatic, whirring pencil sharpeners seem like old technology.  Seems like the only thing we need a pencil for, and a #2 pencil at that, is for those high stakes test in school, or to evaluate your college professor at the end of a semester!  But even now, most major tests are being done on the computer, not with a #2 pencil..

Doesn’t that seem like a million years ago? It all started somewhere in the mid fifteenth century.   First the pencil was actually made of lead, which in, and of itself, was bad for kids, then graphite, lighter and thinner.  And remember as a kid you could actually buy your very own plastic pencil sharpener in a variety of colors to place in your “pencil box holder”?  Oh, hexagonal pencil made of graphite and encased in a thin coating of yellow wood, topped with a lovely pinkish eraser, where have you gone? 

 

It says in wiki (my personal go-to for a quick reference) that the graphite and wood are “permanently bonded- to the core”.   That is exactly how I felt about my pencil, bonded to the core of my being, indelibly imprinted on my soul.   Well, maybe I’ve gone too far!  But I do have fond memories of where my pencil and I have gone and how far we have both come!

 

As the pencil is all but gone as the writer’s implement of choice, I broke away- no pencil pun intended- and upgraded my pencil to word processing and texting. I think of an idea, and I immediately take out my iPhone and jot down those ideas on my phone’s notepad.  I wouldn’t be without it anymore. I write directly onto Face Book, Twitter, and in Pinterest, I upload my pictures to take the place of actually writing words sometimes.  My implement of choice has changed with the times, lest I become a dinosaur! And I won’t have that!

If you could migrate to the bottom of my purse, though, you will still find several yellow pencils of various lengths, and even a cute orange pencil sharpener, just in case I should ever need my trusty pencil.  Do you use pencils anymore? Let me know!