Fountain pens and the devil; letters and absurdity

I attended Catholic schools for a bit over four years. Some of third grade, all of fourth through sixth, and then tenth grade found me cowering in fear of various nuns and priests. For the most part it was bearable and, in fact, I lovingly remember the sixth grade nun who taught me all I’ve ever needed to know about English grammar. (I also remember my fifth grade teacher; I disliked her so much that I threw away the end-of-year gift my mother had wrapped for her – I’ll probably burn in hell for that.)

Another thing I remember is that we were not allowed to use ballpoint pens. Pencils were fine for math work but everything else, at least everything that was to be turned in, was to be written with a fountain pen. I never understood that. Were ballpoints somehow instruments of the devil? Would we not learn if we wrote with them? Was the road to heaven painted with liquid ink?

These questions, unlike those in the Baltimore Catechism that we copied out nightly, were unanswerable. We were told “no ballpoints,” so of course no ballpoints it was.

One result of this odd prohibition is that I have always since loved fountain pens and have always kept several. All of my journals are written with them; all serious letters are as well. I would never dream of writing a thank you note with anything other than a fountain pen.

I hope that's a pencil in her hand.

Last night in fact I wrote two brief thank you notes, both to friends who live in my town, Woodbridge, CT. According to Google maps, one lives 3.9 miles from my house, the other 3.7. I dropped the letters off at the Woodbridge Post Office this morning and decided to pop in and ask whether there was any chance they’d be delivered today – it was not quite 9am and I wondered if the trucks had already been loaded.

“Oh no, not today, not tomorrow either. These have to go to Hartford first, then get sent back here,” said the pleasant postal person.

[Pause a moment for jaw to drop.]

Hartford, according once again to Mr. Google, is 43.2 miles away. That’s an eighty-six mile round trip my letters must take, just to end up less than four miles away.

And we wonder why the USPS is hemorrhaging money? Absurd is the only applicable word. It might have been silly, or odd, that we had to use fountain pens in the fifties, but it was not absurd. And letters, whether written with ballpoints or fountain pens, got where they were going much more expediently.