No one would expect such a tiny object, like a pencil to have the ability to speak, and no one would expect such a solitary thing could bring to me a lot of memories during my childhood. Some say that I should stop keeping pencils and that I’m out of my mind because a pencil is worth nothing, but I say to them “Why they are worth nothing. They provide an efficient way to communicate on paper and also make everyone feel more knowledgeable.
For me, a pencil has its meaning, and it shows that I appreciate something so simple as a thin stick of wood and graphite can bear so much heavy weight on its shoulders. Pencil of world, I salute you, and you are truly the unsung hero of so many. ” Based in my elementary school background in Viet Nam, I was usually called nerdy boy with a little pencil on the top of my ear or the side of my backpack. Some of teacher told me “Minh! You are a legit with a pencil. During my elementary school year, I accidentally dropped the pencil and broke it; like everything else, I was so sad and hold it for a whole day since this pencil was one of my presents from my best friend, Tan, and he wanted me to keep it to remind of friendship between me and him. It also taught me a lesson about life experience and how to overcome when the situation had obstructed me. This was my first time I was worried about something that had broken and could have brought to me a lot of emotion.
The first day I came to school, in my hand ,there was a little secure fist of my mom . Her fist was so warm and gentle taking me all the way to the main gate. When she was walking with me, she whispered with her gentle breeze voice “Minh, you are my wonderful son, and this is a whole new world for you, and from now on, you will be in the academic world with a lot of new things you will study so don’t be afraid to learn”. After talking with me, her hands left my sides, and on my face, the tears are still flowing.
Afterwards, I entered the campus with little embarrassing in my head because everything seemed to be new to me. At that time, there was a person from a far view running all the way to me and tried to make friends with me. He was about my age, a six-year-old boy with a chubby cheek, and his name was Tan, and he seemed to be new as I am in the campus, but he was really excited and was ready for school. He showed me every places in school and showed me which places he just visited.
The campus was bigger than I had thought before. While he was showing me, he said “Come on! You should be excited for the first day! Don’t be so shy and so hesitant if you have any questions or funny things to share. ” After he talked to me, I began to share with him all of my feelings like how I was so scared and shy for the first day of school with embarrassed voice coming from my chit-chat mouth since at home, I talked a lot and shared with my family. After a few minutes, the bell had rung, and we began go to class.
I figured out that I forgot my pen and pencil at home since I was so perplexed that morning for preparing to go to school. Tan said to me “Don’t worry about that! I have an extra pencil in my pencil case! Just take it and keep it for our first greeting. ” After that, each of us went different directions, for Tan, he headed all the way down to the cafeteria while I headed all the way toward to the front which seemed to be very convenient since it was near the front door so that I could go home early after finishing with school.
All the way to class, holding a little pencil in my hands with a humbleness about our conversation, my hands felt warmer, and my heart was beating like a “machine in robot” (all of my arteries, veins seemed to gather together and bring the blood back to my superior and inferior vena cava made my heart beat nearly 130-140 beats/min), so I felt like I had a someone who cared about my situation and could share our happy or sad stories.
After school, I waited for Tan at the front gate, and we went back home with interesting story about our families ; Tan said to me that he would go to Nha Trang to live next month with his family since his father had another business in the other city and wanted to live there for the convenient transportation. Before we separated from the alley, I intended to give Tan back his pencil, but he rejected it and said for me to keep it. After that moment, I had a good, sentimental feeling about Tan, and I really wanted him to stay longer on this campus so we would have a wonderful time with thoughtful, fantastic conversation.
As I thought in my head, after the first time we met, we didn’t seem to meet each other again since on my second day and all of the other days, and I was so busy with homework and family. As I walked along the alley, I accidentally dropped it and someone passed by and stepped on the pencil. The “crack” sound from the pencil made my heart nearly stop beating. From the bottom deep inside my feeling, I just wanted to said to the pencil “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry! Are you okay, pencil? At night, I barely slept and spent the whole night sealing and connecting all of the parts of the pencil since this pencil wasn’t just a regular pencil, it was also the pencil that represented my and Tan’s friendship. The broken pencil made me feel like that we broke our friendship, so I decided to heal it as the best I could to bring our friendship back. At that time, my emotion felt like the echoes from rimrock to rimrock as in Leopold “A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night.
It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world” (Leopold p. 148-Literature and Environment) A month had already gone. The time was flowing so fast, and Tan with his family moved to another city to live. We didn’t have a chance to meet again, but I still brought my pencil to school every day, put it aside in my school bag so every time I looked back at the pencil, I could remember Tan. In my imagination, the sound of the pencil resounded in my head “Minh! You need to live stronger and always believe that Tan is still here right next to you, in your backpack!
Our friendship was still connected and would last forever! Don’t be discourage by the situation that made you go down for a couple days. ” After I heard that voice from deep inside of my body, my spirit revived, and I believed more in life, tried to live happily, thoughtfully and always with positive attitude. From my subconsciousness, I believed that “Tan! You are my most wonderful friend I have ever had in my life! Your pencil not only brought to me all of my memory about you, but also brought to me the spirit of life–a wonderful lesson for me, and I will never forget our friendship”.
I have not ever considered that the literary use of pencil, but it is merely an inevitable object when brought to me a lesson about friendship and spirit of life. It made me realize that our lives contain a lot of magical and spectacular things that I didn’t figure out before, and it motivated me to learn for every single experience that I have every day. From deep inside my heart, I will carved this as my idiomatic sentence “Pencils of world, and I salute you, you are truly the unsung hero of so many, and you are always my guidance of life”.
