Janet enjoys going to the pen shows with me, and she enjoys going to a book awards ceremony with me once in a while. She does, however, have one request: once a year, we take a vacation that doesn’t involve a pen show or a book competition; this year’s destination was Charleston, South Carolina.
We love a good road trip, but Charleston is a little more than we wanted to drive in one day, so I looked for a good place to stop for the night. When we drive to Raleigh, we normally bed down in Wytheville, Virginia - but we have already pillaged the local antique mall there and other than a nice brewpub, there’s nothing else to do.
An hour or two further down the road, however, lies Concord, North Carolina, best known by NASCAR fans as home of the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Concord also has a second claims to fame, one of which intrigued us – it is home to The Depot at Gibson Mill, billed as the “Largest Antique Mall in the South.” Better still, only ten miles or so away in Mount Pleasant is the White Owl Antique Mall, whose fans engage in a friendly rivalry over which is bigger or better.
Our plan was to head southbound on Friday, spend the day Saturday exploring as much as we could of the two malls, then make the rest of the drive to Charleston Sunday morning. After we checked in at the hotel Friday evening, we searched for a place to have a drink and a bite, and we found the Cabarrus Brewing Company. “I think that’s close to The Depot,” I commented.
We settled onto the covered porch early that warm September evening, and with drinks in hand I opened my phone to get directions to the antique mall for the next morning. I could hear Siri let out an exasperated sigh as she calculated the best route to our destination – 300 feet away, right across the parking lot.
Close indeed! The next morning, we retraced our steps and arrived on The Depot’s doorstep just as it was opening for the day.
Endless aisles packed with antiques lived up to The Depot’s reputation, but there was just one problem . . .
There were no fountain pens or pencils to be found. None. Zilch. I was enjoying myself, but it was one of those excursions during which I wonder if we have reached a sort of Singularity or Nirvana in which all of the pencils in the universe have made it into the hands of collectors. I wasn’t exactly bored, but I will admit that if I had been up to my ears in pencil heaven, I wouldn’t have had the time to see that Gabriel Galicia Goldsmith had sent me a message.
Gabriel had sent me a care package last May with a group of pencils - I wrote about several of them in a series of articles beginning with “All Boxed In” on August 27. A couple weeks before we had left for Concord, Gabriel offered me a boxed Parker “Scorekeeper” pencil that wasn’t included in his last shipment. At the time, he was getting ready to move into a new home with his new wife. Sure, but no rush, I said – let me know when you get settled in.
As I wandered the aisles in the South’s largest antique mall, my phone alerted me: Gabriel was settled in, and he had a few other things to discuss.
There I was, nose to my phone browsing spectacular pencils while standing in the middle of the largest antique mall in the South. Janet caught me negotiating terms with Gabriel while I sat in The Depot’s snack bar, and she reminded me that I wasn’t exactly living in the moment while we were on our vacation.
She was right. I was being ridiculous, so I put my phone away and returned to the task at hand . . . and I got skunked. Not one thing at the largest antique mall in the South.
Before we left for Mount Pleasant, we made the arduous commute 300 feet across the parking lot back to the brewery, where we had a late lunch and made a few friends at a dog adoption event (this guy, “Ned,” made himself comfortable the moment I sat down to greet him).
Then down the road we went to the White Owl Antique Mall . . . where I was skunked. Again. The closest thing I found to a pencil was this Charles Lindbergh pencil box from the Wallace Pencil Company.
We still enjoyed the spectacle, and besides: the cardinal rule of vacationing is don’t do what you can do at home, and we antique at home a lot. Still, while we were shopping King Street in Charleston, we couldn’t resist peeking into a few of the high-dollar antique stores, just to see how the other half spends. They don’t spend on pens and pencils down there, either . . . the only thing I saw was a Parker “Shadow Wave” set, but at $800 all I could do was offer to sell them all of mine at half that price.
That set did, however, inspire me to finally write that Shadow Wave piece a few days ago. A few days later we were homeward bound, stopping at a couple antique malls in Columbia, South Carolina (nothing there, either), and then home – where I logged into my online banking and paid Gabriel. His package was waiting for me when Janet and I got home from the Detroit show:
I’ll be talking more about these in detail over the next few days, but the Parker Scorekeeper pencil at top was what led to this entire purchase. I’ve written about these goofy pencils before – see “Bridging the Gap” (October 13, 2018: Volume 5, page 267). They were promoted in Parkergrams, the Parker Pen Company’s in-house magazine, on August 26, 1935, and they were just . . . weird. The top sort of looks like a telephone dialer, but I don’t think that was what it was for. Often people think they are warped, but they aren’t. That triangular barrel is paired with an odd, curved profile.
They came either without lettering or with a cheat sheet printed on their three sides for how to calculate scores in bridge. I don’t think the lettering has been worn off of the unmarked ones, because I have never seen one partially worn - they either are fully marked or not at all.
I had some reservations about the price for the Parker Scorekeeper when Gabriel and I had discussed it weeks earlier, since I already had the pencil and it seemed like a lot of money for a bit of cardboard. Still, the boxes are hard to come by and besides . . . the other things Gabriel added to sweeten the deal made the transaction a no-brainer.
And tomorrow, I can now circle back to something I mentioned a few days ago . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment