I Don't Feel So Silly Now

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Jerome Lobner had this one in one of his auctions recently.  It's the top one in this picture, and the reason it interested me was the very subtle difference from the one I had in my collection:

Most of the time, when you see black “tempoint-style” Eversharp pencils such as these, the barrels are fabricated of hard rubber, chased with Eversharp’s “grecian border” design.  The smooth material is Eversharp’s new plastic, which the company marketed as “Pyralin.”

The auction for this one couldn’t have come at a much worse time, set to close on Valentine’s Day, squarely in the middle of a romantic dinner with Janet at our favorite restaurant - Molly Woo’s, a Chinese restaurant over in the big city of Columbus at Polaris shopping center.  We had arrived early, so as we were browsing the shops before heading to the restaurant I was able to surreptitiously check the status of the auction, and something strange was going on . . .

I kept getting outbid, and the price had gone from “might as well fill out this series” to “damn someone else really wants it.”  Usually I’ll put in one healthy bid when I want something – one big enough to assure that I’ll get something, at a price above which I can’t justify – but someone had blown past that bid and I was in the rare position of being the creeper, edging my bid up several times, each time saying to myself “ok this is stupid.  This is as high as I’m going.” 

Shortly before dinner, with a few minutes remaining in the auction, I was finally the high bidder.  I put my phone away and we settled down for a nice dinner.

But my mind was elsewhere.

Without a clock in sight, it was driving me positively nuts not knowing what happened.  At last I couldn’t take it any more, and I finally broke down and confessed that I’d been bidding on a pencil on the sly during our date.  I asked Janet if I could be rude and check to see if I’d won, and living up to her reputation as “the most patient woman alive,” she relented.

I pulled up the auction to see that there were still just a couple minutes left – and I had been outbid again.  I showed Janet the auction and how high the bidding had reached.  She gulped (just like I had been doing), and she asked whether I was going to bid again. 

No, I said. 

That was stupid money for one of these, I said. 

Only an idiot would pay that much for one of these, I said.

But as my lips were flapping these words, just as I was putting my phone away, this particular idiot threw in one last Hail Mary bid . . . a bid that said just how much it would drive me crazy to know there’s an example out there with a plain pyralin barrel that isn’t sitting next to my example with the chased hard rubber barrel.  At last, with that final bid, I was at peace with whatever might happen and we enjoyed the rest of our dinner.

On the way to the car, Janet asked what the high bid was, and I checked in to learn that my final bid stuck.  “Wow, that’s a lot of money.  Who got it?”  she asked.

“I did.”

“I thought you weren’t going to bid anymore?”

“Fingers must have slipped,” I said. 

The following day, after I’d paid for the pencil, Jerome and I were chatting by email.  I commented that I couldn’t believe how high it went, but I just had to chase it since it was about the only Eversharp in the series that I didn’t have.  And Jerome said something that made me feel a lot better: I wasn’t the only one who had told him that exact thing.  Apparently, the black pyralin pencils are much, much, MUCH harder to find than their chased hard rubber counterparts, and apparently I’m not the only idiot that appreciates that rather obscure detail.

Which means that the following picture means something to a wider audience than I knew:

The pyralin variant exists for the short military clip and deco band versions in the series, too.

And more than a few of you out there will also appreciate my agony over this:

I still haven’t been able to turn up an example in the lowly ringtop.  Here’s to hoping if one turns up in an online auction, it isn’t closing on the date of my anniversary!