Father’s Day

Here is the most recent essay I have been working on. It’s still kind of a draft. I hope you like it.

Father’s Day Draft II

        Shortly after recieving my economic stimulus check, I found myself going to the mall with my oldest brother. However, we were not going to just any old mall, with a bunch of crappy stores that sell overpriced clothes, knickknacks, and cell phones. My brother and I are fortunate enough to live with easy driving distance of the Oakbrook Shopping Center, the jewel in the crown of shopping malls in the Chicago suburbs. Oakbrook is an outside shopping mall that has nothing but the finest stores. They even have an Apple store. I have bought both of the Apples I own from that store, so you can imagine that I have nothing but good feelings toward this mall.
        My brother had his own shopping to do, so we parted ways shortly after walking in from the ample parking lot. The mall was crowded with people, shopping and milling. In celebration of Father’s day, there was an antique car show going on. The outside areas of the mall were filled with old cars and their old owners. I don’t care much about antique cars or father’s day. I work at an automotive repair shop, so I tend to view cars in terms of their potential to break down instead of their beauty and charm. As for father’s day, I don’t talk to my father much because both he and his second wife are jackasses. I did, however, stop to take a look at an old Packard with an in line eight cylinder engine, because a straight-eight is truly a thing of beauty beyond any American male’s capacity for cynicism.
        I threaded my way among old cars and people and eventually made it to my favorite store in the mall: Paradise Pen. I had come to look at Montblanc pens, and I could have gone to the Montblanc store, over by Macy’s but I prefer to spend my money at Paradise Pen because they are slightly less pretentious than the Montblanc store, and they let me play with the pens.
        Montblancs are very expensive, but they’re the best. I figured if I found one I liked and I really wanted it, I could always sell one of my Les Pauls in order to pay the credit card bill. Plus, I have a cheap knock-off of a Montblanc, and I wanted to see how it matched up against the real thing. I played with a number of pens while the clerk at the counter eyed me as if I might make a break for the door with them. Maybe it had happened before. I tried out a #146 (also known as the “Legrand”). Of course I had to try out a #149, which is the flagship of the Montblanc line. Those readers who know something about fine writing instruments may have an inkling of what one has to pay for a #149. For those of you who don’t, I’d tell you, but you would realize how foolish I am for even looking at one and you would stop reading. Like I said, they’re the best.
        The pen that really got me was the #145. Also known as “Hommage a Frederic Chopin,” this pen comes in a custom box with Chopin’s picture on it and a compact disk of his music. This pen has a slightly feminine quality to it. It is light and graceful and is made more beautiful by virtue of the fact that it is unadorned. All of the Montblancs of the Meisterstuck line are fairly plain and made from some kind of fancy plastic that is officially referred to as “precious resin.” But the other pens in the line are distinctively large in shape. The Chopin is more or less normal pen size. If you stuck this thing in somebody’s pen jar it would pretty much fit in with the rest them, at least until someone pulled it out to jot down a telephone number or something and became confused because the cap is threaded on and won’t just pull right off like the caps of lesser pens. It’s like the Chopin is the platonic ideal toward which every bic and paper mate yearns.
        As I played with the pen, turning it this way and that, examining it I might a sword or a violin bow, I began to sense that the man at the counter was growing tired of me. I may be impulsive, but I’m not going to spend a week’s salary on a pen, not at least without getting to play with it for a while first. They don’t have Montblancs with inc already in them at the store, but they do let you dip the nibs into small glasses of water and then write on a special pad of paper that reacts with the water and makes it look like ink. I was dipping my pen in the glass (for I already thought of it as mine) and writing over and over again “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” I had filled up a page and a half with quick brown foxes and I still couldn’t quite pull the trigger on this thing.
        The pen was wonderful, but I thought about the price as I watched my quick brown foxes slowly dry out and fade away. Did I really want to spend that much on a pen? What if I buy it and the price of gas goes up even more? I wouldn’t have enough money to fill my tank and drive to work. On the other hand, that would give me more time to sit at home and play with my new pen. I shouldn’t think it would be very difficult, wielding a writing instrument like that, to write any number of articles and novels in the space of a few weeks. If I bought this pen, my problems would mostly be over. The thing would probably pay for itself when the royalty checks started to show up in the mail. I could put the money back in the bank and then some. I’d probably make enough to quit renting and buy a house. With an Hommage a Frederic Chopin in my front shirt pocket, everything would be alright from here on in.
        Then it occurred to me that one of my dogs might get sick in the meantime. What then? I couldn’t very well pay my vet with a pen. He wants real money and no amount of “precious resin” is going to convince him otherwise. I couldn’t decide. The man was looking at me. I made an excuse and left.
        I milled around with the other shoppers for a while. I asked myself why it was important for me to have a Montblanc. Then it came to me: I had to have one because it’s the best and I always want to have the best of everything. There just doesn’t seem to be any point in having anything less than the absolute pinnacle. I threaded my way among the antique cars and thought about how my brothers are the same way I am. Neither of them would ever consider spending hundreds of dollars on a stupid pen, but that’s only because they aren’t into pens. My oldest brother, for example, got into beekeeping a few years ago, and now owns a massive array of expensive stainless steel equipment for extracting honey. He didn’t buy it just to have the shiniest stuff. He bought it because with the best equipment, you can get the most honey for the least work. It just seemed kind of pointless to buy anything but the best.
        If it hadn’t been fathers day, it might not have occurred to me that my brothers and I all get this from our father, to whom we never speak. Dad was always way too cheap to spring for the best of anything. Nevertheless there was always something in his mind that yearned toward perfection. I can remember interminable Saturdays spent cleaning the house when I was a child. It was my job to clean and vacuum a room called “the porch” which was not a porch, but a sort of indoor greenhouse with lots of windows and a black and white television set at one end.
        Every Saturday I would vacuum the living shit out of the porch. The entire floor was only about twenty feet by ten feet and it was tiled. But I would run the vacuum over it like a dirt obsessed maniac because no matter how clean I got that floor, my old man would look it over and find some mistake I had made. On one occasion, I remember calling him in for an inspection and watching while he sullenly the room over. Finally he came over to me and held out his hand. In his palm were three flakes of what looked to be dried up leaf fragments. Each of these was approximately one millimeter in size. “Do it again,” he said, disapprovingly.
        As I remembered these things, I realized that it had been my father’s purpose in life to turn his sons into anal-retentive lunatics and then unleash them upon society. I don’t know why he should want to do this or what malign purpose it might ultimately serve, and I don’t much care.
         Eventually, I met up with my brother at a restaurant called Wildfire. We had appletinis. He showed me a silver charm bracelet he bought at Tiffany’s for his wife. Then we had some tortilla chips with a spinach dip and went home.
        So I didn’t buy the pen. But I know that someday soon I will drive back to the Oakbrook Shopping Center. I will walk into the pen store with my head high and checkbook in hand. And after that, when I have my very own Montblanc pen, I think everything is going to be alright from then on.