“It’s not you, it’s me.”
That statement has justified the ending of a thousand relationships. In my case, it signified a beginning.
I put up my bronze celluloid Moore 94-A for sale last year. It’s a good-looking pen, around the size of a Pelikan M400. I didn’t bond with it as I’d hoped. The Maniflex nib did flex, but because the ink flow was too wet, I found it difficult to achieve the degree of line variation I wanted.
No one bought it, so back it went into the pen box.
Flash forward to early this year. I was looking for pens to test Noodler’s Zhivago in, and I thought of the Moore. I flushed it, and because I was a little impatient, didn’t bother to wait for the excess moisture to evaporate before filling the pen.
Well, wouldn’t you know. Through some peculiar alchemy of flow and ink formulation, the Moore started writing just as I had originally thought it would.
Nothing had changed with the pen. It was perfectly happy being what it was. I only had to find out how to work with it to get what I wanted.
Hey, if it works for pens, it might work for relationships.
(Thank you to TAO for the 1×1 mm grid Postalco notebook.)
