Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: pencil


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Back to the fold.

They’re probably not excited about it anymore. This buying of paper for school. Oh, how I loved it. I think I still do. I guess it’s why I keep buying sketchbooks. Notebooks. We have an endless way to describe them now. Journals. Diaries. Planners. Maybe it’s all just a way to get our lives on paper. Make tangible. These feelings. Hopes. Worries. Dreams. To give the heart a pencil is validating. Not just internal rumblings. It all becomes real, right there on the paper. 

Of course I use my iPad every day. It’s a wonderful tool. But I’ll always need the paper. And I don’t think I’m alone. I have to smile when I see products like film to put over your screen, to give the feel of paper. That’s the actual selling point — “feels just like paper.” And you know what else feels just like paper — paper. 

Of course our technology has built-in memory. But it has to be directed to “save” something. Paper, all on its own, just like the heart, has a memory. If you fold it, it remains. The tracings, even erased, have created a pattern. Maybe that’s most like us. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the fold. My heart remembers, remembers who was there to help me learn. To study. To free me. To unburden me from a thought that simply had to passed during class. 

I get a little jimbly, this time of year, this back to school. I won’t be getting on the bus, but I will keep learning. I want to always keep learning. So once again, I give my heart a pencil. 

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A permanent connection.

I always imagined myself as the number one. Not in the sense of being first, but as the connection to my number two pencil. She never explained it as such, Mrs. Bergstrom, our first grade teacher at Washington Elementary, but I felt it right from the start. It was such a magical connection. When she passed out the number twos they felt like little wands. Little wands that took the words she wrote on the blackboard and put them into our hands. Words that were filtered through our hearts and graphited to the sheets of paper that lay dormant for six years, never to be blank again. 

I was sketching in my book the other day with a pencil that I bought from MoMA. In this book, to gain the desired effect of lightness, the actual paper must be erased away. I couldn’t find my eraser. I thought it was probably down in the studio. Being upstairs, I didn’t want to make the trip. I started looking. Holding the pencil in my left hand, I felt it. I had never noticed it before. It was colored in black, this eraser. Indistinguishable from the rest of the pencil, but it was there. It had always been there. I smiled to the heavenly blackboard that I imagine Mrs. Bergstrom still directs. And give thanks for the magic.  For making me the number one to my number two. A permanent connection. 

If you’re wondering what teachers can do, I offer you this — this giving of an intelligence so far from artificial that it can still be held in the palm of my hand. 

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Hand held possibilities.

I don’t know that I was necessarily being so “good,” but that’s how it was interpreted. My grandma used to marvel — “I could just put you down, and that’s where you’d stay until I told you that you could move again — such a good kid!” 

I remember her roll-top desk. She plopped me in the chair. I could just reach the handle. It made a little thwapping sound as I pushed it up and then back down. I thought it was the greatest thing, riding this wave, the greatest thing that is until I caught a glimpse of what was inside. Pens and paper and my favorite, the pencil. I loved pencils from the moment I discovered them. The smell of the lead. The feel between my chubby fingers. The newness. Everything was just waiting to be created. I don’t know how long I held the pencil before she noticed me, rubbing it between my fingers as if to will the genie from the bottle, but she wiped her dish soaked hands against her apron and reached the scrap paper from the top shelf.

Tiny squares of white. Some blank. Some with abandoned grocery lists. I covered them all. Scribbles and drawings and near words. I was in heaven. I could have stayed forever. Was I being good? I was being me. 

It should come as no surprise, whenever visiting a museum or landmark, my go-to souvenir is the pencil. I have a favorite — from the Pierre Soulages museum. The weight. The feel. Perfection. I use it in my sketchbooks. But truth be told, I often just hold it in my hand for a moment. And on those days when the world, the day, decides to plop me in an unfamiliar place, I hold on. I take comfort in all of these hand-held possibilities, and I smile, because I find myself saying, “I’m good.”  

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