Feelin' Groovy

Mozeying Down the Line

In their 59th Street Bridge song, aka Feelin’ Groovy, Simon & Garfunkel implored each of us to slow down, you move too fast. Sounds good and refreshing, but given our penchant for always choosing the fast lane, I’m confident everyone will also agree with the following regarding pace …..

One saves time traveling only two hours 

instead of spending eight hours 

on the same journey. 

The theorem at play here is that speed and time accelerate in parallel although opposite directions, i.e., the faster you go, the shorter the time to get from Point A to Point B, or with due respect to Ben Franklin’s admonition, haste makes waste, the faster, and carefully you work, the quicker the task is completed. 

True, but what about the roses? Can you smell them at all while traveling or working feverishly at warp-speed, or must you move at moseying down the road speed  to savor the floral esters?

Pint Size Mozeying

So here’s my premise - experiences can be enhanced when time is expanded rather than collapsed. A required slowdown to smell the roses may be easy to accept, but hard to implement, especially in today’s instant messaging, tweety, I want to have it all and I want it now world!

Make no mistake, I’m not advocating a return to a time when composing and recording important thoughts required banging the keys of a Smith-Corona typewriter and reliance on white-out for typos, or to watching a rabbit ear antenna B&W TV with a twelve inch screen, but I do enjoy many moments back in the analog world. Two such pleasant experiences involve writing personal letters with a vintage fountain pen and, as you might imagine, periodically capturing images with an old film camera. 

For this posting, let’s consider pen and ink. 

Back in my twentieth century junior high school, we learned and practiced cursive writing, frequently using a fountain pen for in-class hand-in assignments. If your pen ran dry, you raised a hand to get permission to go to the communal ink well and fill ‘er up. Considering this practice, gifting a fountain pen, usually boxed with a matching mechanical pencil, was a go-to, if not pedestrian, gift for all the bar mitzvah boys of the era. Naturally when my rite of passage arrived I received my share. That said, I did receive a classic - a sleek black and gold Sheaffer pen. The unique innovation of this writing implement was the snorkel. When filling, rather than immersing the nib into a murky well and mucking it up with gobs of ink, you merely twisted the pen’s end cap and a tube emerged from under the tip to suck in the fluid. The nib remained pristine.

Nib and Snorkel

Of course longhand writing was to become an endangered species almost completely replaced by the keyboard. The key phrase here is ‘almost completely’. Not long ago I learned that when a friend’s signature was required, he reached for a pen handsomely perched on his desk and reserved exclusively for such occasions. It elevated the signing to an almost spiritual experience. The story tugged at me. I then recalled that somewhere in my attic I too had a special pen. Thus began a mission to find it, restore it to functionality, and most importantly use it when special words, words from the heart, as well as my signature were needed. 

Google searches are unquestionably completed much faster than mine but after a methodical expedition through decades of stowed memorabilia, I located the archived Sheaffer and blew off the dust. Clearly, it was in sad shape but still appeared salvageable, a task suited for the experts at Bromfield Pen - established 1948 in Boston. A week or two later the pen was returned to me with a new nib and pliant rubber ink bladder. Life had been breathed into my bar mitzvah pen. 

Today, whenever poignancy of a written word is the right way to go, albeit not the fastest, I fill ‘er up and savor every thoughtful writing moment regardless how long it takes to complete. Afterward, my signature is affixed, the paper folded into an envelope, then I ‘press send’, i.e., drop the missive into a snail-mail box. When I do, even without fresh flowers anywhere nearby, somehow floral esters waft into the air and I smell roses. Today, ‘sunshine in my pocket’ may be a more apt descriptor of that feeling than groovy, but call it what you will, it’s a feel good feeling.

Next time I’ll focus on slow dancing with a film camera.

Leica IIIg circa 1950

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images © David Greenfield