MAY 23, 2025 – My ancestors had a special relationship with stuff. For details, see my memoir (Inheritance), published here in a long series across the several month, mid-year 2023. A less charitable way of putting it is that several people up the chain (“tree”?) were . . . and if I include myself, are . . . flat-out hoarders. There’s no truer label for the phenomenon.
In confronting other hoarders in the family (again, see Inheritance), I became familiar with their rationalizations posing as reasons and how ludicrous they were. One of my favorite hoarder rationalizations was associated with Grandpa Holman’s insistence on saving cheap ballpoint pens that no longer worked. I witnessed his compulsion while working for him between my junior and senior years of college. One evening while I was organizing his “home office” he caught me red-handed tossing pens into the garbage (after testing them to make sure they were indeed “dead”). He protested emphatically.
“But Grandpa,” I said, “I’m trying out all your pens and throwing out only the ones that aren’t any good.” At this juncture, mind you, I’d tested several dozen pens. The ratio of bad-to-good was about 10 to 1.
“But I can get refills for them,” he said.
Of course that was crazy, and being the brash college kid that I was at the time, I scoffed at the refills idea, and waited for Grandpa to leave the room before I resumed my mission. Only later did I realize that his rationale, however genuine, was an attempt to support his compulsion. Only now do I realize that something else was afoot—a double-hoard. What all those pens had in common was advertising—“Joe’s Sunoco”; “National Community Bank”; “Passaic Furniture Co., Inc.”; “Tony Scaparoni & Sons, Inc. – Movers & Shakers.” In other words, they were free. Whenever Grandpa stopped somewhere to do business, he couldn’t resist taking a free pen out of the stash on the counter, at the teller window, on someone’s desk. Fine, that’s what they were for—to be taken by customers to spread the word. I’ve done it myself once or twice . . . or maybe lots of times.
But then fast forward a few decades to when Grandpa was a very old man with a very large collection of cheap pens—most in need of a refill.
I’ll admit, as perhaps I did above, that I inherited Grandpa’s compulsion for collecting free pens. The unnerving thing about this is that the only reason I know I collect free pens is that I have them coming out of my pockets, computer bags and desk drawers. Honestly, my actual procurement of all those pens doesn’t register in my memory. I have no recollection of thinking, for example, “Gee, what do you know? Another chance for a free pen! I’m gonna take one.” Does that let me off the hook? Am I merely a “fifty-percenter” pen hoarder? At the acquisition point, I’m not thinking, “Free pen,” as I imagine Grandpa did, but at some point later, I do think, “Hey, look at all these pens! But now that I have ’em, I can’t throw them away,” which is exactly how Grandpa viewed all his free pens.
The irony, in all of this, is that pens have long been displaced by digital devices. Occasionally people still use pens to complete a form at a medical office or sign a credit card at a restaurant, but I think it’s safe to presume that as I tap out this post, no one is using a pen to write the next Great American Novel.
Now that all this pen business is on the table—or maybe not all the way quite yet—I can proceed with other stuff . . . namely, wood, as in lumber, as in saving it. Since boards. scraps and dimensional lumber fill infinitely more space than a few hundred el cheapo advertising ballpoint pens, hoarding—there, I used the word—wood can pose a serious practical problem. Describing this additional aspect of hoarding will likewise consume far more space, which is why (woodn’t you know) is why the reader must return for Part II. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
