This is not my first fountain pen. That one is lost to the tendrils of time. Discarded or broken, I do not remember. This, instead, is my oldest surviving fountain pen.
I carried it from high school to university, from living in France to moving to the UK. It followed me faithfully, always within reach. Today it rests in a pen holder and sees little use but I will never part with it. It is, after all, my oldest surviving pen.
The model is a Parker Vector. I purchased it during my high school years. Back then I had more money to my name than ever before, and time after school to head into town to ogle the luxury fountain pens encased in glass at the local bookshops. I knew I could never purchase any of them. I never even dreamed of ever owning one of those pens. Instead, I settled on entry level Parker pens. At the time, cheap Waterman were the norm, the pens in the case of all of my school mates. It was mundane. You could find cartridges for them everywhere. Parker was different. For one, entry level pens cost a little more money and you had to get special cartridges, ones with a reservoir you could flick to release emergency ink. I was smitten.
So much so, that once upon a time, I had multiple versions of this pen. This is evidenced in the difference between cap and body of my current pen. They are not a match but remnants of two different pens. On one the body split, on the other the cap split. This I remember.
I selected a version with Looney Toons characters on. Why I did this eludes me to this day. I never care for Looney Toons characters but I suspect I cared very much for the colours. I still do. I can easily imagine that other available colours were black, navy, and red. I was never very fond of those but greens and teals appealed to me.
The nib size was not a choice. Medium it was and this suited me fine. By the time I reached high school, I had heard many teachers complain of my chicken scratch writing (pattes de mouche in French - fly legs). I learned to write on French ruled paper and dutifully kept my lower cases withing the lower gap. I never saw a problem with legibility then but now that I'm older, I have more sympathy for my teachers. Sympathy or not, I knew I needed to write bigger if I were to get graded, so I took to writing with a medium nib in order to be forced to write bigger. It worked.
These days I don't use the pen much. I have returned to my love of fine nibs and chicken scratch writing. I do not write as small as I used to but I enjoy the elegance of a crisp fine line.
The pen rests on my desk. It is a souvenir of a different time of my life and a reminder that fountain pens do not need to be complicated. Today, it is easy to worry about maintenance, cleaning, inking, and all sort of aspects of a pen's life. Back then, I knew none of that. I popped a cartridge in and wrote. If I wanted a different colour, I popped a different cartridge in and worked my way through the old colour, the mix of old and new, until the new colour settled in. Of course, there were no worries of sheen, shimmer, or any special properties. Still, the pen was never cleaned until a few years ago and through all of its mishandling, drops on hard school floors, rattle in pencil cases with other pens, it made it through well enough.
I cannot bring myself to use the pen today. The cap and body carry hairline cracks that could worsen at any time. Yet I cannot quite leave it alone either. So from time to time, when a new to me ink finds its way into my collection, I dip the nib and write a few lines as a writing swatch of sort, and remember how smooth and beloved this pen has always been.
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