Samantha Pellegrino

When I was a teenager, my father gave me a fountain pen. It was, frankly, too expensive a pen for a fifteen year old, but my father has always delighted in giving me expensive gifts. He grew up in a household more tightfisted than impoverished, but nonetheless not rich in either money or affection. Anyways, he told me to use it to sign my first novel for him someday, because he knew that I wanted to be a novelist then. Nearly twenty years later, I still want to be a novelist, but I don’t think my father knows that now.

Since I don’t have a novel to sign for him yet—and as we both age, this is a new and hounding source of anxiety for me: will he die before I ever get to sign his copy? I can assure you that no single sentence has ever been more motivating to my own creative practice—I use the fountain pen to write political postcards. I think my father would say the pen is too fine to be used for such a vulgar (in the classical sense of the word) purpose. But I secretly believe that the pen makes my postcards more compelling. I harbor the superstition that my obvious use of ink in writing somehow makes me, the distant volunteer with the terrible handwriting, more real, more human, to my readers. They can imagine me better in ink; there is an intimacy somehow shared.

I imagine them when I write, too. Was Mr. Butter, whose name I love, teased in middle school? Does the woman who lives on Adventure Drive smile when she sees her street address? How revealing it is that so many streets are tied to landmarks—Mountainview Drive, Brier Crest Road, Old Lake Street, Plum Tree Place—a quiet reminder that we are not at all separate from our geography, even now. How lovely Adelaide Avenue sounds; I used to think I’d name a daughter Adelaide.

And then there is my handwriting, my truly terrible handwriting, illegible to most who attempt to read it, a paleographer’s nightmare. My husband says the people who get these postcards must think, “How nice. Her?” when they see that this nonprofit has asked me, a volunteer, to undertake this particular task. But in the black ink of my fountain pen, I secretly find my scrawl to be beautiful: the loops of my g’s and y’s, my cursive f’s, the way my n’s bleed into other letters. It is only after writing that I have ever looked back down at my handwriting and thought that it is not art.

All of this is to say, I’m glad to spend the good ink and use the fine pen on these postcards. The pen feels almost sacred to me in the promise to my father that it still holds and that I am still trying to achieve. I am pleased to give it the equally-sacred task of human connection in the meantime.