I knew a kid in elementary school named Robert Riddell. According to schoolyard legend, he was related in some way to the Riddell company that made football helmets. This was the only cool thing about him.
Robert kept two amazing items at his desk. They were containers, one a metal lunchbox, and the other a zippered vinyl affair that was stuffed way beyond what it was designed to hold, and bulged like Bukowski’s liver.
What did he keep in these containers, you ask? Keep your shirts on, ladies and germs, I’m getting around to that.
Riddell had packed these containers to the gills with pencils and pens. I know that kids exaggerate, and the years distort our memories even more, and between the telescope perception of a little boy and the tendency of middle-aged men to recollect everything from their youth as if it were the size of Paul Bunyan’s hat, my statement here will be questioned by some of you Doubting Thomases out there, but rest assured— Riddell carried around more pens and pencils during the week than the number of bearded youths who surrendered at Appomattox.
We sometimes speculated about how he had acquired such a vast empire of writing implements. Presumably he’d begun with a large number, supplied by the same people who’d purchased the containers for him. But that couldn’t possibly account for all of it. Like rubes staring at Rockefeller’s mansion, we jealously trafficked in slandering assumptions. A guy named Kevin told me that if you dropped a pencil or pen on the floor, you should pick it up right away, because anytime Riddell saw one on the floor he’d grab it, and it would get absorbed into his collection. It was as if our third grade classroom was a fish tank, and he was an algae eater.
At the time, we just thought he was weird, but today, when every layperson has an intimate knowledge of psychology, we’d probably assume it was a fetish, or OCD, or some such. There was also an oral fixation component, as Riddell was perennially chewing on pencils and pens while the teachers wrote stuff on the board with chalk. One time, he pushed this habit a little too far, and a ballpoint pen busted in mid-chew. I’ll never forget the look of mingled horror and disgust on his face when he opened his mouth and it was filled with ink.
I saw an article the other day about how little kids struggle to write. For once, I’m not referring to America’s growing inability to put a sentence together. That noxious phenomenon was locked and loaded long before the internet existed, nurtured by the now-nearly-forgotten villain, TV. (TV began so long ago, that there were people around then who mocked the laziness of calling it “TV,” rather than its proper name “television.” Now we live in a world where young people and even some older people disdain television for its untenable amount of inconvenience. Kids and adults alike have forgotten that there was a time not too long ago when you couldn’t just turn on a little machine if you were in the mood to hear a story. If you were a man, you worked like a dog all week, and then dragged your bedraggled ass to the general store to join the old coots gathered around the cracker barrel. If you were a woman, you made breakfast for the coots, slopped the hogs, made the beds, dusted the chickens, and then ambled over arthritically to the gossip fence, five miles from your house. If you were fortunate enough to be a syphilitic member of a royal family, it was more like the modern era. If a fellow with royal blood was in the mood to be entertained with a riveting tale, he simply kicked a nearby jester and watched him go.)
This new obstacle to writing is more chilling, somehow— American children now have trouble just holding a pencil and making it go back and forth on the page, because the hand muscles required have atrophied.
While this horrifies me, it also reminds me of one of the funniest and most touching things I ever saw. Since I didn’t have a smartphone at the time to capture it, I’ll attempt to set it down for posterity here.
When my son was little, I was writing something on a piece of paper one day. It was probably lyrics for a song, because I was vehemently crossing out a bunch of words, scratching back and forth with my pen. Then I noticed my son dancing to the rhythm of my pen on the paper.
If “travel writer” Lawrence Millman were reading this, he’d probably point out that the likelihood of something organic and beautiful like that ever happening again in America is slim to none. He won’t read this, though, because he doesn’t take consumer electronic devices with him when he’s in the field, and he’s ALWAYS in the field. Generally, you can find him in an igloo, chatting with wizened and wind-chapped geriatrics who still remember a time when their countrymen regularly decreed themselves to be Jesus, and attempted to baptize all and sundry with their own blood. The more practical maniacs would harpoon dissenters, before shooting them in the face with guns helpfully provided by visitors from the less arctic lands of mystery, far, far away.
You can find all of this and more in Millman’s amazing books, so I won’t spoil any more of his stories. He tells them better.
He occasionally indulges himself by lapsing into scolding mode, chiding the screen-addicted modern world for our rapturous tolerance of corporate algorithms.
I don’t really disagree with Millman on this, but whereas he’s a modern scribe desperately trying to set down a record of a dying world, I see myself more as a traditionalist-modernist. Though my ego is so large I rarely even notice it, my achievements are modest compared to my artistic ancestors like Lenny Bruce, Merle Haggard, Flannery O’Connor, and Thelonious Monk. These luminaries were steeped in tradition, but made an impact by subverting it. That’s what I try to do, and my quixotic approach gobbles up more modern methods every day. I’m making plans to collaborate with a local “turntablist,” a fellow whose discipline is so esoteric that its golden age has arguably come and gone without white people recognizing it as anything more than a ridiculous novelty. When I told my mother-in-law I was looking forward to working with this musician, she responded the way she might have if I’d told her I was planning to go to Egypt to jam in a pyramid with a bunch of mummies.
Later today, I need to figure out how to “scan” documents with my iPhone, so I can make good on my promise to a Ph.D I met at Howard. I have a facsimile book called “The Minstrel Encyclopedia,” from 1921, which lays out extensive instructions for those who want to raise funds for their high school or Kiwanis Club chapter by putting on a minstrel show. She suggested I scan the book for her, which immediately made me embarrassed over my well-meaning offer to send it via the Pony Express. I love that I’m using today’s technology to preserve this quaint evidence of yesterday’s racism, just as I love that I was reading Millman’s Luddite rantings under the covers this morning with a smartphone, like a kid reading Tom Swift and his Atomic Meat Tenderizer might have, but with the aid of a battery-powered flashlight the size of Thor’s hammer.
Batteries have come a long way, incidentally, but not nearly long enough for my liking. We’re living in an era where a middle class pre-school kid has access to technology comparable to anything Captain Kirk had available, and the main thing we have to look forward to now over the next thousand years is a battery that doesn’t require us to spend half our lives charging our devices, and the other half figuring out where our kids put the charger. Modern Americans like to sneer at people who still have landlines, but the ability to roam far and wide with your phone seems to be somewhat exaggerated. Our smartphones are like vampires, whose unholy powers are mitigated quite a bit, when you think about it, as they have to return to their coffins before daybreak lest they turn into a pile of ash.
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