Elaine Johnson

Picking through a bottomless shoebox of pencils, ballpoints and other office clutter from my parents’ home, I found the keepsake that matters most to me as a writer. My mother’s Parker 51 fountain pen.

The pen is a classic, but not rare. With the help of the internet, I learned the Parker 51 was one of the best-selling pens of its era. My mother’s pen is from the late ‘40s or early ‘50s—the years after she left high school and before she married my dad.

Uncapped, it looks like a slim black cigar with a small nib protruding from one end. The nib is a little off-center--not by design, but due perhaps to the mechanics of my mother’s handwriting over long years of use.

I remember her using that pen throughout my childhood, especially during our shopping trips to the department stores in downtown Rockford. As I stood at her elbow at the checkout counter, she would remove the silver cap with its arrow clip and pause over a sales receipt just long enough to make a series of ovals in the air. It was a Palmer penmanship exercise she learned in school. And until Parkinson’s Disease erased her perfectly slanted handwriting, she always warmed up that way before putting pen to paper.

I would watch as she signed her name to the charge slip—Mrs. Raymond Johnson. That confused and annoyed me. “Your name isn’t Raymond,” I said, foreshadowing the cultural changes soon to come.

Eventually, the Parker 51 was sidelined by ballpoints and felt-tips, and I never asked my mother how she came to own it. Maybe she bought it as a 20-year-old bookkeeper, just starting out in the world. And if that pen could write its own story, I would know for sure.