It is a curiosity of my existence that in my medicine cabinet I have a half-stick of a styptic pencil. The ordinary kind one might find in the average drug store or pharmacy. It has been useful over the years, being a product that certainly lived up to its announced purpose: to stop bleeding from minor nicks and scrapes. I rarely use it anymore, having switched to an electric razor many years ago. What makes this remnant curious is that I have had the thing for about twenty-five years. Twenty-five years is over half my life.
Who holds on to such a thing, for so long? What am I clinging to that makes me keep it?
That pencil was purchased at the drug store on the main street in the downtown of the small town where I went to college. I still remember the day I bought, although I cannot tell you why that was significant.
My head is full of such things. Good thing my head is big, I wish it weren't so damn heavy sometimes.
I thought about that pencil tonight as I ruminated on a swirl of personal issues, things about my past, my present, my future. The chalk-white stub a totem for the spirits of memory. I see it there in the cabinet and it makes me wonder what I will stanch the flood of thoughts and memories that have clustered around me.
There is some anxiety, there is some bliss. I put the pencil back in the cabinet and wonder at the things I can let go, so that I may have room inside to embrace that which I want to welcome into my life.
15 September 2011
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25 years is quite an achievement..... I'm kind of impressed that it's remained that long, although obsolete.
ReplyDeleteI have a few things that I can't yet throw out, though I've been toying with the idea of it.