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A few thoughts on the nature of erasure

By Ed Goldman

I recently read a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal about pencils suddenly being a hot commodity among young people—really young people. Elementary school kids, those whom I’ve dubbed Gen-Tykes. 

I thought one of three things could be at play:

1. That I was still in bed asleep and dreaming I’d traveled back to 1937, when kids still knew what pencils were. But I was clearly in my current kitchen and managed to recall—admittedly, with some effort—that I hadn’t been alive in 1937. 

2. That “The Onion” newspaper had taken over the Wall Street Journal in an overnight coup. But this seemed unlikely since I’m sure the rebels would have immediately dumped everything written by Holman Jenkins, Jr., who writes the Journal’s regular Village Idiot column. Yet there was his work, the same week, which, as always, had something to do with blaming Democrats for either COVID or the rise of Satanism in the world’s financial markets (Junior kind of fancies himself an internationalist). I pray that if there’s a Holman Jenkins IIIrunning around, he’s into software development, coaching girls’ volleyball or working as the night manager of the Spearfish, South Dakota Black Hills Lodge. Please don’t join Daddy’s business, Trey. 
3. That the story had been scheduled to run on April Fool’s Day but got held up in production (damn that supply chain blockage!).

When sanity returned—though made clear it might agree to having just a quick cocktail but had no intention of spending even one single night here!—I realized the article was a lighthearted but serious feature story about that week’s quicksilver trend. 

In the distant past that trend has been everything from hula hoops to Chia pets, from Fig Newtons to Wayne Newton, and from Novocain to Kurt Cobain (both no longer with us, I’m sorry to report). 

Now, we learn, kids who mastered potty training only a short while ago have turned into day traders—though that day gets interrupted by naps and snacks, of course. The particular object of desire is a mini-pencil—which, as far as I can tell, is very similar to the one you’re handed at bowling alleys and golf courses to keep score and lie about the score, respectively.

So far, the trades are somewhat innocuous. Two mini pencils for your PB&J and bag of Cheetos, for example. One mini-pencil for just the Cheetos. Zero pencils for the banana or apple in your lunchbox.

When I was a kid, pencils were prized possessions you kept in boxes, pocket protectors or in your mouth while working over knotty arithmetic problems. These usually were on a par with the following:

Farmer Frank has 36 hens and one rooster with the dashing name Largo. Largo is exhausted from accommodating those 36 hens. But Farmer Frank needs to go to market in three weeks with a minimum of 60-dozen eggs. What should Farmer Frank do?

1. Call a hen escort service and ask for 12 Chippendale roosters to be driven over ASAP.