The Pencil Incident
A Tales Out of School Story
They came! A half dozen pencils with my name imprinted in gold. This was one of the most exciting things that my first-grade self could imagine, my first personalized items. I picked a green one and a red one and put them in my pocket and headed out to wait for the bus. I pulled the two pencils out of my pocket just to make sure that I had not lost them in the five minutes since I left the house. The bus screeched to a stop and the door popped open. I climbed up the steps and found a seat. I checked my pocket again. Good news, the pencils were still there.
When I got to school, I ran straight to the classroom, sat down my books, and pulled out the pencils. I skipped to the front of the room where the pencil sharpener hung from the door frame of Mrs. Johnson’s storage closet. I made sure the sharpener was set for standard size pencils, inserted the green pencil into the sharpener, and cranked until the handle got easy to turn. I pulled the pencil out, blew off the shavings, and looked at the fine sharp point, touching it with my finger just to make sure it was sharp enough. I returned to my desk and set the pencil in the pencil tray on my desk.
I could hardly wait for Mrs. Johnson to give us a writing assignment and was happy when she said we were going to practice writing the alphabet after we finished our reading groups. She passed out lined paper sheets, the kind with the dotted line between two solid lines. I retrieved the green pencil with my name in gold and started to write but the lead bent over and fell out of the wood. I got up and made my way to the pencil sharpener and cranked out another fine point.
Back at my desk, I started to write again. The lead snapped off again leaving a hole at the end of the sharpened pencil with just a bit of graphite shadow around it. Back to the pencil sharpener again. After achieving another fine point, I went back to my desk and resumed writing. The lead snapped off again. This was getting bad. Surely another sharpening would do the trick, but the lead kept falling out of the wood and the pencil got shorter until my name was beginning to disappear along with the pencil. I repeated the same steps with the red pencil and got the same results. There was no hope now, and I fought back tears. I didn’t want to cry but my high hopes for the personalized pencils disappeared into the shaving bin of the sharpener.
When recess came, I ran across the hall where my brother was coming out of his third-grade class. I threw myself into his arms and the tears began to flow. He patted me on the back and said a few words which I hoped would be comforting. What he actually said was, “Don’t be such a bawl baby.” It did the trick. I dried my tears on my shirt sleeve and went out to recess. When I came back to class, I did the only thing I could do, I went back to the plain yellow number two pencil that looked like everyone else’s.
