Pen People and Office Cities
Last spring, I received a package from the landlord at an apartment I’d rented in Tucson, Arizona, during a three-month travel nursing gig. “Found in the bottom dresser drawer,” read the note inside a flat rate USPS box, in which she had expertly rolled six pair of scrub pants and matching tops, packed in like sardines. I had agonized over leaving the place spotless when I’d vacated the previous week, but despite my fastidious efforts, had overlooked the scrubs. “I also found this beautiful Pigma Micron pen under the couch. I’ve never seen the sepia one—beautiful!” said a piece of paper rubber banded to the pen. Only a pen person would do that.
And only another pen person would send an eight-pack of Pigma Microns, including sepia, as a thank-you.
I love pens so much that the word has taken on a second meaning in my house. Pens, the noun, are what clutter my desk and roll around in the bottom of every bag I own, but “pens” is also what I’ve come to call the activity of sitting down at the table with an assortment of pens, my calendar, journal, monthly planner, and lots of unlined paper. Pens is all about doodling, journaling, letter writing, drawing intricate spirals, rows of interlocking geometric shapes, and concentric circles. If I’ve had a particularly bad day, Chris will say to me, “Why don’t you just sit down for a while and do pens?”
“Pens Plus” is next level; more business like. In Pens Plus sessions, I devise intricate color-coding systems for my calendar, create to-do lists, five-year plans, and budgets. Just going through the motions of Pens Plus helps me feel more organized and empowered, regardless of the fact that the systems rarely stick.
Perhaps my collecting, even hoarding, of pens comes from a childhood marshaled by pragmatic parents whose distaste for frivolity extended to our school supplies. If I remember correctly, there was a family crayon protocol, a gradual progression from the eight-color box to the 12, finally hitting the plateau with the 24 color box of Crayola Crayons in about third grade. My sister Michelle and I theorize that the root of the pen obsession lies in the fact that we never got the 64 color box with bronze, sea green, orchid, and the built-in sharpener. Michelle is a pens person, too.
It’s hard to believe there was a time without pens. Back in second grade, relegated to those chubby, dull pencils that squeaked on the paper as you wrote, pens were the dangling carrot. I remember when Mrs. Koeppel told me, “In middle school, you can use pens.” It was enough incentive to soldier on.
I joke sometimes that I could plan a whole vacation around office supply stores, but it’s not really much of a joke. I could write a guide book to office supply store travel, expanding the field to include art supply and stationery stores so I could highlight some of my favorite destinations, like Posner’s in Tucson, Arizona; Olympic Art and Office in Port Townsend, Washington; and the curiously named Bri-Easy Shipping in Salmon, Idaho—which, while predominantly focused on shipping, has a wide variety of pens, souvenirs, and up until my last visit in 2019, a border collie who sat in the window the way a shop cat would.
It’s worth noting that the really good office supply stores, the ones with old-fashioned mileage ledgers, budgeting templates, map pins, and pens galore, seem to also be in towns where you find diners that are famous for their pie. These are the kinds of places that check all of the boxes of a strong town: somewhere you can leave your car behind and spend the day taking care of business on foot. You can grab a sandwich, mail a package, duck into a public library, maybe wrap it up in a city park talking to someone about their skateboard, or meeting dogs.
Hamilton, Montana, is one of those places. I cannot drive through Hamilton without stopping at the Coffee Cup Cafe for a piece of Sawdust Pie, nor can I pass by the Paper Clip. The latter is where I wandered to recently in search of a very specific, hard-to-find, adorable little pen with an ultra fine, 0.25 mm metal tip called the Pentel Slicci, which has become an essential tool for writing tiny reminders in my monthly planner.
The store owner’s face lit up when I asked for the pen by name. I half expected her to take my hand as she led me down the aisle. “Here’s where I keep my Sliccis,” she said, gesturing like a magician. She saved me from ordering the pen online, and having it show up on my doorstep in a refrigerator-sized box wrapped in ten feet of bubble wrap.
I delight when shopkeepers refer to their inventory as “my,” as in “my Sliccis.” It sounds both dignified and endearing, and makes me feel like I am in good hands. I also love when shopkeepers describe what they “carry,” as in, “As far as my index cards, I carry 3x5 and 4x6, both lined and unlined, neon colors, or white.”
Office City in Missoula, Montana, is my local source for pens. The name makes it sound like a big box store with acres of fluorescent lighting, but it’s not. Locally owned since 1916, Office City is in a brick building downtown, a well-stocked shop run by knowledgeable, friendly people who seem to love office supplies as much as I do. Behind the counter, hanging from invisible wires, are what appear to be relics from Paul Bunyan’s desk: a giant paper clip, clipboard, pencil, and pink eraser, each larger than life.
“Just browsing,” I called out when I walked in the other day, headed for the pens. The manager was talking animatedly with a customer about pre-season baseball. He smiled and nodded at me, then went back to the Phillies. He knows me as a pens person.
For several minutes, I scribbled my name, stars, and spirals in 0.5, 0.7, and 1.0 mm lines on the tiny pads of paper intended for test driving the pens, keeping one ear tuned to the conversation at the counter. Someone stopped in and bought three glue sticks, then came back a few minutes later saying, darn it, might as well order a whole case! It was as if he’d gotten halfway down the block and realized he’d never seen glue sticks of such caliber. There was laughter, and more baseball talk. It felt like being in a bar except, as far as I know, everyone was sober.
“Come back next Wednesday when my new Pigma Microns are here,” the manager shouted as I walked toward the door with three new pens I didn’t need. “Fresh green and royal blue!” I already had royal blue, but fresh green sounded so good I wanted to eat it.
Asking a pen person to return to an office supply store is like encouraging a kid to return to a candy store. I didn’t need fresh green to entice me, but when I got home I wrote “fresh green—Office City” in tiny letters with my Slicci on the calendar square for the following Wednesday, just in case.
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Karla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.