Turquoise Ink Lasts 45 Years

Around the age when text gets blurry, some little loops in life clear up.

As kids in religious school we used cartridge pens with blue-black ink for our work, no exceptions, while our teacher used humiliation for his work. "You don't know the answer? Did you even study? Why should I keep wasting my time on you?" He managed to hate every one of us.

But his old-style fountain pen wrote in turquoise. It was an unearthly color in that gray room. I cared little about my grades or his approval -- I only wanted to get my papers back with that wonderful ink on them. I loved to look at that celestial blue; I simply could not reconcile it with that sour old man.

My daughter enjoys school. She's just discovered calligraphy and nib pens -- how smoothly she can write, how the ink pools darker in some letters, and how cool her writing looks from the back of the paper. She even hand-wrote an "authentic" 100 year old diary for a literature project. And when she bought herself a nice pen and an assortment of ink, of course she instantly loved the turquoise -- chattering about exactly what shade of sky or ocean or gem it matched.

So there are again papers around the house with that beautiful ink. But this time around, joy is a part of them.

--WF