I can’t recall the last time I purchased a pen and yet I have loads of them. I am at a loss as to where they all came from. They’re crammed into a broken mug on my desk at work and heaped higglety-pigglety in drawers throughout the house. This one advertises a car dealership in San Diego, and this one tells me to do my banking with Bank of America. I have plastic pens, metal pens, cheap pens and expensive pens. I have pens with blue, black, red and even purple ink.
Where did they all come from? I didn’t buy any of them.
Nothing speaks as poignantly to me of the largesse of our society as these pens. We hold them so cheaply that no one really thinks to lay a firm claim of ownership on them. We take pens from work, and we leave them there too. We pick them up and lay them down wherever we have need of them. Few would think to return a pen they accidentally pocketed and even fewer would notice, much less care, if one of their pens went missing. Although nobody seems to buy pens nobody seems to want for them either. It is a great mystery to me. They come and go like the wind, exchanging hands, and drifting from owner to owner until one day they fail to complete a phone message or the signature on a credit card receipt. Then they are thrown away. It is strange though that even after throwing pens away we don’t seem to have less of them.
It is truly a mystery.
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