Canful of Pens

I have so many stray pens strewn through the house and in my purse from places I have been, businesses I have frequented – some I have not . . . there is one which recurrently comes into my hand from a place I have not been – “Studley Chiropractic Clinic.” That’s the inscription on just one of a can full of pens I poured into a box of miscellanea to bring home with me when my sister and I cleaned out my mother’s house after her death. The can of pens was on the hutch cabinet near the phone – a large soup can that she had covered with a yellow-and-orange floral design contact paper. She began to stand pens in the can, one at a time – I imagine – as she was given them over many years from such places as the chiropractor’s or dentist’s or doctor’s offices where she went; from the hardware store, bank, pharmacy, or hearing aid center – the trail left by a widow who had learned to take care of herself.


Some of the pens must have been mailed to my mother from Medicare, for they tout advertisements for drugs that I’m sure she never took – Lexipro, Namenda, Maxalt-MLT. She was noted for curing all ills with an aspirin and a good nap, though in later years I suspect she let a prescription-trigger-happy doctor make those choices for her – this will help, he most likely said too often. Maybe her pharmacist put one such pen in each bag of refilled prescription – another pen – and she placed the pen upright in the tin can by the phone.

It’s been more than a year since I spilled the can of pens into the box and brought them home with me and placed them in a small clay pot near my own phone. And in this past year many of those pens have been pitched, one by one, into the large trash can – that is, if they didn’t work when I needed them to. I’m always careful to read the pen just one last time to see what piece of the trail just ended.

That’s why most of my mother’s pens are gone now. Only a dozen or 15 remain, like this one that keeps coming into my hand from Studley Chiropractic Clinic. She must have gone there a lot – and he often gave her a pen – for I think I have 5 or 6 of these pens in various colors. I don’t remember ever tossing out a pen from Studley Chiropractic – and my mother quit going to him at least 10 years ago because she thought he had cracked a bone in her osteoporotic spine – and I think she was right – for she was in so much pain after a visit – and an x-ray showed there was a hairline fracture in the lumbar spine.  Looking back, I would say that was the beginning of her slow decline, for she stopped her decades-long daily walking routine after that – a hairline crack that would become the great divide between a healthy lifestyle without drugs and – the other side – though of course no one could see it at the time. I’ll bet that’s when the town’s prescription-zealous doctor began saying things like, this will help – and so a pain medication began, and then the refills cycled in – and maybe that’s how the pens advertising odd drugs got into her home.

Before the hairline crack in her spine, she would joke to us about her chiropractor and dentist sharing the same small office building on Main Street – only one dentist in town and one chiropractor in town – an unlikely partnership of two diverse professions, but one that made sense with so few professionals in town. The partnership was called “Studley and Dickie” – for the dentist’s name was Dr. Dickie.

She thought that was so funny – as did all the women, mostly widows, in her quilting group.

“I’ve got my appointments with Drs. Studley and Dickie today,” one woman might say.

“Two in one day?” another might be obliged to say before the whole quilting group cackled at the old joke. We – her children and grandchildren – never got tired of the joke, the way she said it anyway. It’s funny to me how Fate (another word for Humor, I suspect at times), has an easier time of creating such odd bedfellows in small towns than in the biggest of cities. I wonder if either of these dignified older men ever suspected how much fun the town’s elderly women were having with their names . . .

So my mother would schedule her dentist appointment . . . and since she was going into the building anyway, she would make a chiropractic appointment . . . and the quilting group would have met the day before or the day after – all as I imagine.

I suppose she picked up one pen from each appointment, for I have several of each that stand upright and alongside each other in the clay pot – and they have been the most humorous reminder of the trail she left.