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The Buying-Spree Chronicles
A time-lapse illustration of an open book morphing into a bird was printed diagonally across the yellow paper bag designed to fit an A4-size booklet. There were three bags in all, each featuring the drawing in deep green, maroon, or navy outline. The bags were ancient. I opened one of the bags that had been rolled into the shape of the items inside and showed the contents to my mother. Takes me back, she said. Bookstores used to put your purchases in these bags.
What kind of books did Grandpa used to buy? I asked. Every month he’d come home with a gardening magazine, she replied, though he stopped doing that in recent years.
“Remember the flowers and trees that were in our backyard up until maybe ten years ago?” she asked.
“Do I? They were pretty subtle, weren’t they?”
“Mmm. Plums and quinces.”
“I kind of remember. The quince flowers were pretty.”
“They were. But they died as soon as I started caring for them, so I had to throw them out,” my mom commented plainly, drinking the last of the tea she’d poured for herself when she came over. Anyway, do what you want with these, she pronounced and left.
The three paper bags were filled with pens. More than a few of them. My mother had tried listing them on a flea market app, but after a week of no activity, she decided to call me before discarding them, as they were writing utensils, and technically, I was a writer.
Grandpa left an astonishing number of pens behind. Want them? Or do you not write by hand anymore? You do everything on your computer now? Should I just toss them?
My mother hurled question after question at me, through which I managed to reply, I’ll take them for now. Which is why she was over with the three bookstore paper bags.
I reached into them and pulled out the bundles of pens, which I lay on the floor: all one hundred sixty-eight of them. Every single one was green. Talk about stocking up . . . Thinking back to my childhood, my grandfather did take me to discount stationery stores and the neighborhood stationery shop all the time. He let me tag along because I loved stationery, and on every visit he bought me something new: coloring books, paper dress-up dolls, maze workbooks. All the while, he must have been stocking up on these green pens. Not just one or two either; I bet he cleared out the entire stock.
The green pens, which had a visible ink tank that showed how much ink was left, were officially named Letter B. The B stood for Bold, according to the company’s website. The Letter B line continues to sell steadily, though they’re no longer featured front and center on pen display shelves. I’ve used one or two myself over the years. I’d say the color selection—black, red, and blue—was pretty conservative by today’s standards. The green pen, of which my grandfather owned a hundred sixty-eight, had been discontinued. I did some digging online and found they’d stopped making them eight years ago. Users of the reliable, no-frills Letter B, advertised to provide a smooth writing experience until the final drop, wanted only black, red, and blue. Green was too much. The color was the last to be added to the series, and the first to exit.
As I lined up all one hundred sixty-eight pens facing the same direction, I remembered my mom lamenting, “Why couldn’t they at least be black?” I’d resented her comment at the time, but found myself thinking the same thing now. If the pens were black, I could commit to using these and only these for the rest of my life.
But they were green. A nice color, no doubt, just not useful for signing official documents and such. Maybe I could take notes or journal with them? But most of my personal writing I did on my phone; I can’t remember the last letter I scribbled by hand.
When my mother posted the pens on the flea market app and failed to sell any, she’d given them a rather broad label: More than 100 green pens. I told her she had to provide a product name and list the exact number of pens, so she started counting them until she realized she couldn’t be bothered. My mother’s ‘I can’t be bothered,’ I learned recently, was a sentiment that had deeply embedded itself after a lifetime of doing things that bothered her, and now, no matter the day, week, or month, there was hardly a time when she had the patience to bother with anything at all.
So I was impressed that she was able to get all hundred sixty-eight pens over to my house. Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out—they were keepsakes of her late father.
I did have my reservations about whether this non-mainstream color (for a writing utensil) would be worth much. Having once belonged to my grandfather, they were likely considered ‘used,’ and unlike new pens, which were sold at a uniform price, the used market was unforgiving when it came to color options. Of all the choices we now had for inputting data—handwriting, typing on a keyboard, recording a voice memo—I most enjoyed typing into a phone, which is why I owned four cheap, used mobile phones (smartphones without SIM cards). They’re all pink. I don’t particularly like pink. But when compared to secondhand phones in silver, black, or blue—in the same model with similar degrees of damage—pink phones were always cheaper. Used prices were honest. Pink was simply not a ‘safe’ color for most users. The same was probably true of green pens.
Because I never write anything by hand, I wandered around my room until I spotted an empty envelope on which to test the green Letter B. It was a nice color. Gentle on the eyes. It wasn’t as dark as I thought. Not exactly what you would call bold. Maybe that was why it was discontinued. But it also explained why it was my grandfather’s go-to pen.
“It’s about kidosa,” my grandfather said to me a few years ago. “Know what that is, Ei-chan? My eyes twitch and get tired when I stare at black text on a white background for too long.”
Can you show me how to change my computer background to gray? he asked. I tried looking it up, but it differs according to the software. My grandfather wasn’t the type to give up on a task because he could no longer bother with it—he worked until he found a way to address any discomfort. Over a couple of visits, I helped him adjust the wallpaper color on his most-used apps.
Paper is mostly white. Which is likely why he gravitated toward the green pen, which was lighter than black and easier on the eyes than red. From what I could tell in the image that popped up in my search, blue was still too bold to alleviate my grandfather’s issue with kidosa, or luminous intensity. I’d depended on Grandpa’s green pens when I was cramming for my college entrance exams. They come in handy when using the clear plastic study tool—a transparent green sheet—to hide the answers to vocabulary words and equations I was trying to memorize. The Letter B wrote smoothly and I loved the color, but once I got into college and no longer needed to memorize anything, we had drifted apart, the green pen and I. And though I rarely pick up a pen now, if I were forced to choose between black, red, blue, and green, I have to be honest. I’d probably go with black. Once in a while I saw shopping lists written in green taped to our fridge, but Grandpa mostly used his pens to write in his diary, or maybe it was more of a daily log. Dozens of notebooks were discovered after he passed away, in which he had noted my grandmother’s medical condition, things they talked about, memos on his own health, commentary on a TV show or a meal, sketches of flowers and trees, ducks he spotted in the park. He wrote it all down.