The Gutter Pencil

via Pippa’s Cabinet
Bridget Watson Payne writes, “When I was in high school I carried my pens and pencils loose in the small front zipper compartment of my jansport backpack. The pencils were for math class, but at sixteen they still carried an embarrassing aura of childhood with them, and so I made it a point to pay them as little mind as possible. As a result what I had were half a dozen pencil stubs--each maybe two inches long, eraser worn down to nothing, heavily chewed on (because, yeah, no, gnawing on your pencil isn’t infantile at all). My best friend Fern always teased me about them, referring to them as my ‘gutter pencils’ (the implication being, I guess, that they looked like I found them in the gutter)...”
Read the rest here. I used to have several very short, very chewed, yellow #2 Ticonderoga pencils in school; now I know that they had a proper name!