Fountain pens and old friends

**BillPorter** · April 10th, 2015, 01:45 PM

A couple of months ago I started fiddling with fountain pens. I hadn't used one in years, not since I was working full-time, and even then I used them rarely.

I retired about 10 years ago from college teaching and am always on the lookout for projects and hobbies to occupy my time. My latest interest is fountain pens. I had two pens from my working days, a Waterman Expert and a Parker Vector, and an old Sheaffer snorkel pen my dad had used prior to his death in 1954. I soaked and flushed the Waterman and Parker and sent the non-working Sheaffer to Danny Fudge for restoration. Of course, I had to buy a few pens as well.

Not wanting to just collect pens, I had to find some reason to write with them. Journaling was the obvious answer, but I’d never kept a journal and wasn’t sure what to put in one. Googling journaling produced literally dozens of ideas about what to put in a journal. I bought a notebook and started writing.

One of the journaling ideas I ran across, one I liked a lot, was to use ones journal to detail things for which you were grateful. I put down the thing I was most grateful for (my wife) and went on to include the hours of enjoyment I’ve gotten from various hobbies and activities, and lots of other stuff. Somehow I’d forgotten an item that should have been high on my list – the wonderful friendships I’ve had throughout my 73 years. I started a list of people, going back to when I was five years old, who have been especially good friends. Some of the people on the list are no longer living and there were others with whom I have lost touch. I picked the name of a person I had been close buddies with when I was 12 years old, a guy who lived across the street from me in Oklahoma City. I knew him for only about a year before my family moved to Denver in 1953. We spent countless hours playing a little baseball game he had and many more hours just talking sports or tossing a baseball around.

Could I track him down after more than 60 years? The Internet is a powerful tool and just knowing his name and his passion for sports, I found him! Turns out he had become an award winning sportscaster. Minutes later I had a phone number. I called and left a voice message. A couple of days later my phone rang and there was my old friend on the line.

My friend and I had a great conversation with none of the uneasiness that sometimes occurs when you haven’t had contact with someone for years. And then I used one of my fountain pens to write him a letter. Even though it had been over 60 years since he had heard from me, I think he was pleased to find that he had been on my list of special friends.

**SteveE** · April 10th, 2015, 02:58 PM

Isn't it great to re-connect with old friends? Within the last couple of years, I've re-connected with two groups of old friends. One group is from my old neighborhood on the northeast side of Chicago. There are now 5 of us, next time there will be 6. At the last dinner we had, the 5th member of the group joined us for the first time - and we hadn't seen him for about 50 years! Anyone watching us would have just seen a group of middle-aged (and older) men who were close friends. You'd never know that there was a gap in our contact of 30 to 50 years.

The second group I've connected with are folks I worked with 25 years ago. Again, you would never know we hadn't seen each other for decades. I guess it shows me that once a friend, always a friend.

Although neither of these experiences ever related to pens, it probably shows that as we get older we tend to want to hang onto those relationships that had meaning for us.