13September2007
My Black Pen
Posted under places beginning with: P; Providence; Rhode Island.
We’re very pleased to announce our first story on Calling America and we hope it marks the start of more to come. ‘My Black Pen’ is by John Holdsworth of Providence, Rhode Island.
It was around 9am back in May 2004, I was heading up Wickenden Street towards Utrecht, a store on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island. I needed a pen. In fact I remember thinking on the way there that I needed the best pen my last 20 bucks could buy. You see, I’d been nearly three months out of work. I got a back injury at my previous job. I was a courier working for a printing company. Me and the guys at the depot had a little game going on, you know some coffee break entertainment, raising the stakes to see who could shift the ’six pack’, that’s six boxes of paper, each one weighing almost 40lbs and it was a 30 yard run from the loading bay to the truck.
Stupid now that I think back to it, but when you do the same job 8-5, day in and day out, you’ll do anything for a little entertainment. So I took the heavy load and I felt it go straight away. Slipped some discs in different places. It had me laid out flat for weeks in a hospital bed and all I could do was watch and think.
And I thought long and hard for the first time in 45 years about who I was and what I wanted to do with my time ahead. I realize that I didn’t have much choice in the early years. I got pushed about from place to place, first by my dad and then by Pauline, my ex. I had a dream lying in that hospital bed. I saw myself as an old man, grey and wrinkled in a wheel chair, watching the kids come home from school. I’d say ‘hey there’ but they couldn’t hear me, they couldn’t even see me. I’m nobody. Well I certainly was nobody before that accident and I probably still am. But the difference is that I’m aware of it now.
At 9:10 I left the store with a new black fountain pen and a sore back and I walked a block further to the Brickway Cafe. It’s the best place in town for breakfast. It’s full with construction workers on most mornings but if you leave it a little later, just after 9 you can get your own table and they make the best French toast I’ve ever tasted. So I ordered some coffee and took out my notebook and pen and I began to write.
I’m not an educated man and I know I’m no great writer but I just like to write. I write about what’s happening around me. I look at things, I hear people’s conversations, I see images in front of me and I try to describe all this on paper. Just me and this piece of paper. And I’ve been doing this ever since I had that dream. Until I find another job I’m going to write. I figured nobody else here in Providence is recording what they see, so maybe there’s some meaning to these notes after all. We’ll see. That’s my story for now.
