Happy Fountain Pen Day

Happy Fountain Pen Day!

It was Fountain Pen Day last week, the first Friday in November, and it’s one of my favourite non-holidays. Or maybe it is a holiday! It’s a celebration. Who needs the Ontario government to make it statutory? I love saying (tongue in cheek?) Happy Fountain Pen Day! to all my favourite pen people the way normal people say happy Thanksgiving or happy Valentine’s Day. I may have indeed wished it upon unsuspecting humans as well, because life is too short to hold the good stuff in.

I was on the TTC the other day with my trusty Wonder Pens tote bag (which has seen better days, and features the now-defunct studio shop), and someone recognized me as a fellow member of the fountain pen cult. On public transit, these days, I sometimes feel like everyone has their guard up, just wanting to get to their destination, to get to work, to get home, to get to that appointment. Sometimes there are unpredictable passengers and unpredictable situations on the streetcars and everyone just wants to mind their own business. But for the very slow trajectory along Dundas, we found in each other a fellow stationery (almost stationary?) traveller, and we were delighted with each other’s favourite pens, whipped out from within bags and pockets, and the appreciation of the very specific feel of a nib on the page. Other fellow non-stationery travellers lifted their eyes temporarily from their screens to give us the side-eye and then moved down the streetcar, wary of potentially erratic people waving about their pens and talking about cults.

How did you celebrate Fountain Pen Day? I hope you are (still) using your favourite pens, or maybe waking a few out of their slumber to ink up. Put them in, coach! There is no time like the present, and there is no pen like a fountain pen. What are your favourite pen and ink combos of the day? Upon whom will you thrust a trusty and unused Preppy, praying for their conversion?

As for me: While he was here in Toronto, Matthew ground a few of my fussy nibs into glorious tips that now leave smooth, microscopic streams of ink across a page, and I’m winking at them from across my desk, as I do, not at all feeling a bit unhinged. Is that a sign of actually being unhinged? Not feeling unhinged about doing unhinged things? Am I slowly becoming more and more derailed as life goes on? Who knows!

My desk is cluttered with my favourite things: overdue library books that have not yet been cracked open, some homeless cat mooching off the free kibble in this house, a tin box full of treasures and emergency white rabbit, tiny totoro stamps,—and a few fountain pens, housed in a pen roll I’ve had for a decade. I will miss the clutter of life when it’s gone. These golden days. 🌞🌞🌞

To celebrate Fountain Pen Day, we donated $500 to the Daily Bread Food Bank.