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June 15, 2003
mark thomas I've passed a series of milestones in my life. Inconsequential? I don't know. These are not corporate-speak "Life Changes" like having kids or getting married (yeah right). One milestone involves a box of pencils. I bought a box of pencils a few months ago. Twenty-Four No. 2 pencils. I handed the box to the Walgreen's cashier and smiled an all-knowing grin to myself. It was the kind of grin that peels across the face of someone who Just Knows. These, I knew, were the last pencils I would ever purchase. The pencils from this box will be in my kitchen drawers and on my desk to the day I die. It happened almost instantly, but I arrived at this fascinating conclusion by taking the rate at which I use pencils and dividing that by a vague notion of how many years I have left. Then I factored in pencils to be stolen from future employers and pencils to be found or otherwise acquired. All these instinctual calculations were performed in the 1 second it took to hand the pencils to the cashier. It is very rare for me to pick up a pencil to start scribbling calculations or doing crossword puzzles. The ability to erase things -- the key feature of pencils, I would say -- goes against my every instinct. I do not erase, I only accumulate. Even while typing these sentences I do not erase the bad ones. I move them down to the bottom of the page and save them to what I think of as a residue file. I have done crosswords with pen since the 7th grade. I remember being in the I was showing off, and I do not doubt that to this day the only reason I do crosswords with pen is to live the lie and continue making those kids in the 7th grade think I could solve crosswords on the first go without erasing anything. There have been other turning points, or milestones, of similar triviality. For instance, a couple of years ago I started using warm water while brushing my teeth after using cold water for as long as I can remember. This is a life decision, and I will not go back to using cold water to brush my teeth. Ever. There was no sudden moment of lucidity about this. I just know. It's not about the box of pencils, or the cold water. These are metaphors for the encroaching reality, which is that within a few years I don't see myself changing any more. No thunderbolts of clarity, no instants of life changing drama, no events of shock and horror that have the power to change the way I look at the world. There have been more of these milestones, each more stimulating than the last. Every observation gets filed away, and the accumulating self-absorption settles under my mind like a used box spring. These passing observations are, I think, glimmers of the serenity that I think my mind and spirit could house. I hope that these slivers of contentednesss are a sign of things to come. I want to be serene in my old age, not tiresome and irritated. Though I am not nearing 40, this all reminds me of a Donald Justice poem I discovered in grade school:
I found that poem in 1982 in a book called "Pictures That Storm Inside My Head," a book of poems I bought that year at the Waldenbooks in University Square Mall in Tampa. I would never buy this book today -- the cover is finicky and the subtitle ("Poems for the Inner You") would make me roll my eyes if I saw it in a store -- but the poems were exquisitely tuned to pre-adolescence, and the book has grown along with me. Whatever state of squalor any of my apartments may have been in -- either because of my slovenliness or because I had just moved in or was just moving out -- I have always, always known exactly where in my residence this book was located. I never packed it up and shipped it off with my dinner plates or LP records. I always had it with me when I moved from place to place. It's part of a mental punctuation mark, knowing that something in my life has always been here and has come to mean new things every time I go back to it.
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