When I first met Dolores, I had no idea why she collected something stupid like pencils, but she was my friend, and I guess that’s enough. Every Friday, she’d wait in front of the school store at Josephine Wells Elementary School, a school we both hated, and carefully pull a nickel out of her overall’s front pocket. She kept it there especially for her Friday purchase. Sometimes, most of the time, she’d beat Mrs. Jenkins to the store and would stand in her Keds just waiting for the first sound of Mrs. Jenkins’ high heels on the linoleum near the teacher’s entrance.
Mrs. Jenkins loved Dolores because she was “our most consistent customer” through all of those years and all of those grades. Dolores loved Mrs. Jenkins because she was the provider of those pencils. Those multi-colored pencils embossed in gold with JOSEPHINE WELLS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, silly as they were, somehow meant an awful lot to Dolores.
I figure they meant a lot because she’d never sharpen them. Not one. She’d put them all in the top drawer of her hand-me-down desk over at her house on Blue Street. Sometimes she’d open that drawer and just sigh.
Every week, she’d take out those pencils – in a very ceremonious way, now that I think about it – and line them up across her desk. Each week, she’d put them in a different order. Sometimes, they’d go by color, sometimes by most recent addition, sometimes alphabetically by color names.
Dolores said that the first one she ever bought was the silver one with gold lettering. She decided to keep it new because it was the first. Well, then the second one was yellow, and that went with her hair, so she couldn’t sharpen that one. The next one was gold with gold lettering and it was hard to read. A challenge! She couldn’t sharpen that one either. And then there was the shipment of ones misprinted with JOSEPHINE WELLS SCHOOL without the ELEMENTARY – and when Mrs. Jenkins called them “Rare,” well, forget that. You get the picture.
I didn’t tell Dolores that I thought what she did was kind of creepy until about the 9th grade. By then, she’d stopped buying pencils, even though she did buy one at the school store in high school the first day of 8th grade. But on that day, she found out that all of the high school’s pencils were the same colors EVERY week, and kind of lost interest in the hobby of collecting. Now she was just admiring her collection.
When I told my mother about her hobby, she wanted me to stay away from Dolores, because my mother once had a Crazy Uncle George who collected things for no reason, and HER family had always warned HER to stay away. But I didn’t. I thought there had to be a reason for the collection and that if I hung around long enough, I’d figure it all out. In the meantime, friendship was enough.