Manifesting Writing Tools

I don't believe you can "manifest" stuff, but I have been known to do it a time or two anyway. There was the time I was in Saskatoon and I said to my friend that I wanted to meet Little Richard. We sat down outside the Bez and he came out the front doors five minutes later, like he knew I was there waiting for him. There was the time I wanted a skirt like one I'd seen Daphne Moon wear on Frasier so I went to the thrift store and it was there and it fit and it was $1. And, of course, there was the time I moved to Regina and met Barclay, completely by chance, on my second day here, after a friend in another city had told me about him and what a good couple we'd be. 

It happened again just this morning.

I was painting at the kitchen table with Scarlett. I'd just gotten her a new watercolor set and we were testing it out. She painted flowers, butterflies, animals. I painted the alphabet and a xylophone.

When Scarlett asks me to paint with her, she means business. She doesn't like me to stop to think about what to paint or take pictures or blink (in both of these pictures, she is saying, "Stop that and paint!"). As soon as I set one page aside, she hands me another and tells me to fill it. She's like a personal trainer, asking for more reps, and more reps, and more reps. It makes me feel scrambled and I end up painting really random things. 

Like, today, after my xylophone painting, my brain shorted out. I couldn't think of a single thing to put on the paper, but her little eyes were on me. "Paint something," she demanded.

"What should I paint?"

She shrugged, her eyes burning a hole in my blank paper. She didn't care at all what it was, she just needed something there, and she needed it there now.

I painted—and I really don't know why—the words 'fountain pen.' 

Then I painted a [really crappy] picture of a fountain pen. She frowned at it. "What's that?"

"A pen," I said.

"Doesn't look like a pen," she said.

So then, of course, Sully came over to see my pen that didn't look like a pen. He studied it. "What's that?"

"It's...a pen?" Crippling insecurity. What kind of grown woman can't draw a convincing pen?

"Why's the end of it look like that?"

"It's called a nib," I explained, shriveling up under the critical gaze of these two tiny art connoisseurs. "This kind of pen is—" But Sully had abruptly left the room. 

"Keep painting," said Scarlett. 

So humbling, attempting to create in the presence of children.

I bent over my paper once again, but then Sully came back into the room. He had a little tin mint case. He opened it and set it on the table in front of me. Inside? Five little pen nibs.

We don't own pen nibs. "What..."

"Are these nibs?" he asked.

"Yes," I said slowly, picking one up, pointing to one end of it. "If you had a fountain pen, you'd stick this part into the—"

Without a word, Sully went back into his room and came out again carrying a fountain pen. "Is this a fountain pen?" 

"Yes," I said, completely flabbergasted. "Where—"

"So how do you make it write?" he asked, offering no explanations. This is where I began to think, I am legitimately manifesting a fountain pen, piece by piece...

"Well," I said, trying to read Sullivan's inscrutable face, knowing, somehow, that whatever came out of my mouth next would be in his bedroom somehow. I wondered if I should tell him you need a million dollars to make a fountain pen write. I looked down at my painting, which was, apparently, a magical painting. "You would need an ink bottle—"

I looked up. Sully was gone. And when he returned, guess what he had?

"Is this an ink bottle?"

It was. But it was empty.

"You...wouldn't happen to have ink in your bedroom, would you?"

He smiled. 

He went back into his room and came out again with another little black bottle. On the side of it were these words: 

Calligraphy Ink. Stuart Houghton. Made in Great Britain.

Which did not, in any way, explain how it came to be in Sullivan's possession.

I showed him and Scarlett how to insert the nib into the pen, how to pour the ink into the bottle, how to dip and write.

Everyone was enthralled. Fountain pens are soooo fancy.

"Okay, Sullivan," I said at last—and maybe I waited so long to ask because I knew the answer was going to be ridiculously boring and ordinary and not at all magical. (And I was right.) "Where'd all this come from?"

"Grandma gave it to me."*

Mystery solved. I manifested nothing. ALTHOUGH, one could ask the question: how did my subconscious brain know to draw the very thing Sully had that I didn't know about? Or, I suppose, maybe one should be asking the question: what else does he have in the depths of his bedroom that I don't know about?

Anyway. I'd forgotten how fun fountain pens are and I might have to make a trip to the Paper Umbrella for new ink sometime soon. 

(*She gave him a bag of dress-up clothes for his birthday, and this was in there. I had no idea.)