Pencils

One of the challenges on a typical school day around here is finding a good, sharp pencil. An attached eraser would truly be the icing on the cake … a diamond in the rough. Yesterday I spent a considerable amount of time decluttering a couple of drawers where we keep writing utensils. My goal was to separate the pencils and pens from crayons, markers, coloring pencils, etc. thus cutting down on time wasted trying to find something decent to write with. There’s nothing like finding a good ol’ yellow #2 pencil, newly-sharpened with a smooth, pink eraser on the tip.  One of the attorneys at the law firm I work with has a can on his desk filled with a mixed assortment of pens.  But there is one single, irresistible pencil (eraser up) in the middle of all those pens. Once he showed me that the pencil has actually never been used because it has not been sharpened.  But he admits he can always tell when someone has been in his office looking for something to write with, because that pencil has been picked up and set back in the can with the unsharpened lead end up.

Yes, there are pencils like that attorney’s – lovely, yellow, handy eraser attached at the end.  These are the pencils of my dreams:

Let’s get a better look at those lovely erasers:

(P.S. Sadly, I didn’t actually find these pencils among our stash, they’re just images I found online).

And then there are Worley pencils.  (cue sad music)

After throwing out a good portion of quarter-inch long crayons and dried out markers, I eventually got things weeded out to the point that I was able to start the final leg of my organizing: sharpening the pencils I’d been able to round up.  It was quite a rag-tag collection of specimens, but one thing was consistent with practically every pencil:  teeth marks.  The Worleys have a long and undistinguished history of chewers.  Not just pencils, but pretty much anything that sits still long enough to be chewed.  Some of the kids have been more orally-inclined than others, but they’ve all done their share of chewing. 

Which brings me back to my sad set of pencils.  This is what I have to work with; a random set of pencils that I just grabbed out of the pile to sharpen:

If you look closely, you might notice that, yes, even the lead end of some of the pencils have teeth marks.  By now, pencils like this are so common around here that we only notice when they’re not chewed – you know, the first 5 seconds we take them out of the box.  What really breaks my heart is the erasers - or lack thereof.  This is typical:

<sigh>  Look at that one on the right end; even the metal surrounding the eraser has been chewed!  So, we buy those handy Pearl erasers and just make do.  I wonder if, when our kids are grown, our house will have only pencils that look like this:

But knowing me, I would be nostalgic for the good ol’ days of chewed pencils.  So, for now, perfect pencils exist only in my dreams, and on Bing images, and that one pencil on that attorney’s desk.