Like a kid following a puppy

I have a case of the wandering mind, one thing leading to another…

I decided to iron, plugged in the iron and grabbed the spray bottle and went to get the clothes in the bedroom that needed to be ironed. Noticed the trash basket in there needed to be emptied, dumped it in the big trash, tied the top and took it out to the garbage can. I noticed a weed in the rose area, pulled it out and noticed a few more, went to throw the weeds in the garbage can and saw that the mailman had been by, I turned on the water to catch a dry spot in the lawn, got the mail and took it in the house. There I noticed the licorice sack on the table was left open and grabbed that, went to find a twist tie and remembered the dishes needed to come out of the dishwasher. Then I realized the clothes needed to come out of the washer and put into the dryer, and when taking the clothes out of the dryer I remembered, THE IRON IS ON!

In case you're wondering if I snared this story off the internet, nope. It really happened right here at home.

Who?

I told Kyle recently that Whitney Houston had died. He said, "Who's Whitney Houston?" I kid you not. Shortly thereafter I mentioned Howard Cosell and his announcing style. He said he'd never heard of him either.

Kyle and I were sitting here watching a Jazz game the other night (a real nail-biter) though the Jazz won, when the cameraman shot a closeup of Gordon Hayward. I mentioned how he looked a lot like Opie. Kyle said, "Who's Opie?" I said, "WHO'S OPIE???" He said, "I've never heard of him." I said, "You know, the show with Barney Fife". He said, "Who's Barney Fife?" I said, "Oh my heck, remember Richie Cunningham?" Yup. He did it. He said, "Who's Richie Cunningham?" I said, "No chance you'd know Otis then either, huh?" He said, "Otis who?" He didn't remember the Fonz but had heard of Gilligan, though he'd never seen the show.

I told him that is like his kids one day asking who John Stockton and Karl Malone were. He said he didn't have any kids. I asked Teelay and her friend if they knew who Opie or Richie Cunningham were. Strike out.

If I know what a mosh pit is and send a thousand texts a month, shouldn't they be required to know who Opie is? Just a thought.

In Case You're Planning a Summer Family Vacation...

In the summer of 1985, having been married for 15 years and never having taken a vacation, we planned a trip with our five children (ages 4-14) from Vernal, Utah to Lake Louise, Canada. We rented a 32-foot camper to pull with our dual-tank Chevy truck which already had a regular camper in the truck bed. This was when gas was about $1.20 a gallon. If you’ve ever seen that old Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz movie “The Long Long Trailer”, you can just call me Lucy.

The truck only had one long seat, so we traded off on who sat in the front with us and who got to enjoy family togetherness in the truck camper. Basically, it went like this: We drove until somebody was crying loudly enough for us to hear it, then we pulled over. For some reason, I was the main driver, except for when we had to back into a campground spot.

I was terrified that one of the kids would break something in the trailer, so I was like a camper Nazi, "Don't touch that! Don't do that! Keep that out of there!" When we stopped off in Idaho Falls to eat some fast food. Jason & Jared got horsing around and Jared chipped a front tooth on one of the propane tanks on the camper. We just kept going...VACATION BOUND OR BUST! We stopped in at a cute little store near West Yellowstone and bought ice cream cones, scooped with their patented rectangular ice cream scoop.

The original plan was to pull off the road the first night in Yellowstone and just enjoy the trailer. The problem was that the Rocky/Bullwinkle crowd had built curbs all along the roadside to prevent such camping. Keep in mind, this was the week of July 4th and we hadn't even conceived we would need a reservation to camp. We stopped in to see Old Faithful and get some more ice cream. Thankfully we were all too terrified of the walkways to get close to the hotpots. (We may have been crazy but we weren't stupid.) The most interesting thing about Old Faithful was that we spotted our next door neighbor's vehicle in the parking lot, though we didn't spot them.

We got the last parking place in some campground and took off for Canada the next morning, passing through Wyoming to buy fireworks. The reason that we didn't get to Canada the second day was that Montana was in the way; there is a reason it's called Big Sky Country. We decided to take a back road, thinking for some reason that the main highway might be too crowded. Jason kept holding up signs about needing to get out and go fishing. He also held up signs about needing to use the bathroom, wanting to eat, or that Sherry was crying. Occasionally he would light a ladyfinger firecracker and throw it out on the road, scaring us out of what was left of our minds. Every time he would swear it was the very last one and every time, he was flat out lying! We would swab the deck a couple of times a day to get rid of chips and red punch. (That was before scientists warned us about children and red punch.)

Both tanks were on fumes when we pulled into Buffalo. We stopped to eat, gas up and use the facilities. On the way out of town, one of the truck tires blew out, sounding like a musket shot. I still shudder to think of what could have happened had that occurred any other time that day; we had driven almost 6 hours without seeing one other vehicle. Somewhere south of the Continental Divide, we gave up and camped in the Montana wilderness for the evening. During the night, a spider bit poor little Nik on his cheek, resulting in swelling that closed his eye shut.

When we arrived at the Canadian border, a man came out and asked us where we were from and if we had any booze, rifles or fireworks. No, No, and Yes. He also commented on how some people from Vernal had just come through a few vehicles before. Turns out they were our neighbors. He didn't ask for our passports, because back then Canada was considered an extension of Idaho or Montana rather than another country, and regular people didn't carry passports anyway. He said we had to turn around or leave our fireworks with him, to be forfeit if we didn't return for them by nighttime. That put a real crimp in our travel plans, since we had invested a week's wages on them. What we did was leave them with him temporarily, but crossed the border just so we could say we had. I'll never forget pulling that long trailer up the road to St. Mary or Martha's Lake by Waterton Park, where coincidentally my son-in-law now works.

.

The gas pedal was to the floor and we were barely moving. Since it was straight uphill, the gas tank register sunk like a rock. For once, everybody was quiet; nothing like fear to silence the crowd.

We were happy to see a KFC and decided to get lunch and eat it by the beautiful lake. Since we weren't going to be able to make it to Lake Louise, this was a decent option. We went into KFC, but they didn't have any of the regular stuff. The only thing we recognized was chicken and rolls for $15, (roughly the equivalent of $150 today), so that's what we had for lunch. We walked through the little town of Waterton, had ice cream and purchased some souvenirs. I bought a wooden plaque with a gold deer on it labeled "Waterton Park". The kids got candy and some little plastic faces where, if you put your fingers inside them, they made all sorts of wacko expressions. Jason says he still has his somewhere. (Incidentally, when we got home, I noticed that all our souvenirs were stamped "Made in Japan.") We drove back across the border, got our fireworks and found a nice campground with laundry facilities. Do you know how nice it is to have laundry facilities?

The next night we made it to Deer Lodge, Montana. It was packed and we ended up camping next to some mountain men in teepees. They were probably as unnerved by us as we were by them. Personal fireworks were not allowed, but the town had a small display of its own. By that time, I did not care either way. Two days later, we were pulling the camper up the hill between Heber and Duchesne when the truck overheated. Jason got out and fished in a stream til the motor cooled off, and we finally limped back into Vernal. Vacation accomplished!

The next day I tallied the trip and realized we had averaged six miles to the gallon. We could have driven the kids to Disneyland in our car, stayed in a motel and had enough left over for a trip for the two of us to Hawaii. I kid you not, but who wants to have fun on a vacation anyway, right?

Our neighbors returned a few days later and told us about their wonderful spontaneous trip to Lake Louise.

Footsteps

One summer, I stayed home with Dad while Mother took the other kids on a trip. It runs in my mind that they went to Yellowstone or Montana. Even back then, riding in a car made me so nauseous as to kill any fun. Mother left me $5 in case of emergency, though I can't imagine what emergency my dad couldn't have resolved. Maybe she felt sorry for me or something, but I was happy to be left behind.

One night while the others were gone, Dad took me to Downey to a Doris Day movie. Doris Day movies were usually a safe bet, quite light-hearted, but this one was an exception. We weren't there five minutes before my dad said: "Let's go." He got up and headed for the door, so I followed him. He didn't stop to demand a refund either. I'm not sure if we discussed it on the way home, but I knew why he left. Even though it was a unique treat to go on a date with my dad, this was a lesson I have always remembered.

Over my lifetime, I have sat through probably eight movies that I hated from the git go, or ones that started out ok but deteriorated steadily. I regret not having had the guts to get up and leave. Though I haven't gone to a movie in quite a while, in the last few years, I did get up and leave a movie on three different occasions and am resolved to do so if I ever find myself in that predicament again.

Thanks, Dad.

Grandma's Trampoline

Years ago when Nik was just a young boy, we were up visiting my parents in Clifton. Mother and I were chatting in the kitchen when Nik came upstairs to ask her: "Grandma, may I jump on your pretty trampoline?" We both looked at each other, wondering what he meant. We thought maybe he was referring to her little exercise trampoline, but wouldn't have called it pretty. He was insistent that she had a "big pretty trampoline", so we all went downstairs to check it out and discovered that he was talking about the beautiful quilt she had been working on that was set up on quilting frames. Good thing he asked, huh?

Quilts are rather magical, especially home-made ones. I've tied quite a few baby quilts in my time but never did the hand-sewn swirl design like my mother did. She would drive over to the little Swan Lake store and buy their brushed nylon fabric. They would mark a pattern on it in soap and she would stitch along the lines. There are probably 50,000 stitches in each of her quilts, and that doesn't count the hand-stitched binding. To thank the eye doctor for removing her and Dad's cateracts years ago (in addition to paying for it in cash), she gave him one of her marvelous quilts.

When living in Vernal decades ago, I decided to make a queen-size quilt, bought some white fabric, cut it into squares, ironed a pattern on each piece and embroidered the works. Then I cut green squares to alternate between the embroidered squares and somehow did a drapery-like gathering around a bedskirt, tying it all together. That pretty much cured me of the quilting bug and I have no idea how I fit that in between tending four young children. I mend a few things here and there now but have willingly forgotten anything else about the sewing art.

One of the funnest memories I have from childhood is seeing all the different pieces of fabric in a quilt. The backing always consisted of heavy flannel (usually plaid) but the front was made from pieces of cloth gleaned from worn-out clothing or left-over fabric, sewn together in a pattern on Grandma Rice's old Singer treadmill sewing machine. "Oh, look, there's a piece from my Sunday dress." "There's one from my old shirt." "There's one from Myra's dress." It was so much fun!

Grandma Rice had a lot of quilts, some made from wool. I remember sleeping in her basement bedroom during the winter now and then. Oh my, it was so cold! What you would do is make sure you were in the middle of the bed, reach down and pull the covers up. You had to get situated first because the quilts were so heavy, you woke up exactly where you went to sleep. There was one of her quilts that I admired greatly. It was black and red. Every time I went over there, I'd mention it. She told me that I could have it after she died. I just kept on admiring it until one day she just gave it to me on the spot. I guess she didn't want to be rushed ha.

If you want to gawk at some pretty quilt patterns, here's a link: https://www.google.com/search?q=quilting+patterns&hl=en&prmd=imvnsb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=11o4T4H6FaSXiAKYqOyNCg&ved=0CJIBELAE&biw=1024&bih=677

For background music, how about a little John Denver:

Playgrounds

Reminiscing about playground equipment today...

The local gradeschool has several swings, the rounded rubber-seated kind. Speaking of rubber, all the area under and around the swings is covered with ground-up tires. I'm all into recycling, and there is no doubt reasons why they use the stuff, but it's hot and prickly and you can twist your ankle walking through it. But then, I don't swing on swings anymore, so it's a moot point.

They do still have monkey bars and a slippery slide, but I don't think they have teeter totters. Teeter totters are a little like weapons; they are safe in the right hands, but not safe in the wrong ones. I could never understand why someone would get off one end of the teeter totter when somebody else was way up in the air, letting them crash to the ground. Maybe that's why they don't have them on playgrounds anymore, a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Monkey bars nowadays are basically like several hamster wheels tangled together. A kid could almost get lost inside one of them. The monkey bars "back when" were much more simple and included a bar amongst the swings where you could hang upside down from your knees. They were mostly used by boys, since girls were required to wear dresses to school every day. You could do it wearing a dress, but both hands had to be used to hold the skirt in place, so getting off and on the bar was a little tricky. (my daughter-in-law says farmer's wives used to do everything farmers did...only they had to do it wearing a dress!)

I remember the big old slippery slide we had for grade school. It would get so hot in the sun that it all but burned the skin off your legs...as you slide down it in your dress. After a while, the slides developed drag, stranding a kid halfway down, so somebody would get some waxed paper and smear it on the slide for more speed. We had a merry-go-round (not the up and down kind) that held a lot of kids at one time. Nobody really wanted to be the one stuck spinning it. We always tried to find a bigger kid to give it the first turn. Just thinking about it now makes me nauseous. (Plus, I'm still a little ticked that I lost tongue cells from that time I decided to rest the theory of whether or not tongues would really stick on cold metal...and, fyi, they really do.)

Another whirling dervish toy was called the giant stride, so named because you grabbed ahold of one of the hanging bars and ran with great strides to pick up speed. Then you simply ran a few more strides and repeated it til somebody either flew off and broke their arm or go the wind knocked out of the. Needless to say, they don't have those on the local playground anymore either. There is one at a park somewhere in northwestern Utah that we stopped at a time or two so the kids could play. They always wanted to come home by the "Pioneer Way". There was an old stagecoach/buggy on display, plus some wonderful carvings in short fence posts, and a genuinely wonderful country park...

...with a working giant stride. Wheeee!

Every kid worth their salt had a pair of roller skates, complete with tightening key. You just slapped them onto your shoes, tightened the strap, adjusted the top clips with your key and off you went. We got pretty good at it.

I had lunch with my cousin, Ruth Ann, a couple of weeks ago and we got talking about playing jump rope. She has a good memory about that stuff. I remember the sing-songy "Blue Bells, Cockle Shells, Evie, Ivie, Overhead. My mother, your mother, lived across the street. Every night they had a fight and this is what they said: Icka backa soda cracker, icka backa boo, icka backa soda cracker, out goes you!" It started out at a regular pace but after the rhyme, the jump rope holders would spin the rope as fast as they could til you messed up and got a whip burn. Ruth Ann reminded me that the fast-roping was called "pepper". There were probably more than a dozen little jumping rhymes, none of which made sense and some of which were no doubt politically incorrect, but we didn't notice. We were watching the rope and having fun. When you got really good at it, they could turn two ropes at the same time. We got pretty nimble.

The Punch Crunch

The Lunch Ladies: Mrs. Kirkbride, Mrs. Helmandollar, and Mrs. Powell, all now passed on to that Great Lunch Room in the Sky. They probably arrived at West Side High earlier than the janitors and set about making homemade delights for close to 200 students.

My favorite menu item was the magnificent made-fresh-daily homemade bread & butter sandwiches. Their mashed potatoes and gravy were also to die for, as was their gingerbread. I never liked applesauce dumped on my gingerbread so always tried to intercept that; I like both applesauce and gingerbread, just not in the same bite.

If somebody had taken a survey, pizza would probably have topped the student-favorite list, though I never developed a hankering for it. The good news is that there was always somebody who wanted to trade something for my slice; the bad news is that they never made pizza and homemade bread on the same day.

As soon as you walked into the lunch room, there was Mrs. Powell waiting to either take your quarter (later 35 cents) or punch your lunch card. As I recall, there were about a dozen punches to the card. The hole-punching made quite a crunching sound and I can still hear it in my mind even now...hence, the title of today's blog.

After the punching and crunching came the munching. You grabbed your tray, your utensils and your carton of milk and went through the lunch line. To help with the actual serving of food, two students were selected each week from some class; they donned hairnets and plastic gloves and took their stations. For their service, they got lunch free that day.

We had neat lunch trays, shiny metal originally, then heavy plastic, but always with divided sections, including a narrow section on one side to hold the utensils. Interestingly enough, when I go to "Bring a Grandparent To Lunch Day" with my grandkids, they still use those trays. The plastic is so industrial that they could be the original ones. I came across several of those trays at a yard sale a few years ago and bought every one of them. There they sit on a top shelf collecting dust. If you are throwing a nostalgia school lunch party, just let me know and I'll let you borrow them.

Now and then on Fridays, you could take your pick from regular or chocolate milk. Way back in grade school, they would have "Milk Nickels" on Fridays. Those were a lot like Cascos but without the nuts. I'd pay a dollar for a Milk Nickel right this minute.

Medical "School"

While trying to treat a recent ear ache at home last week (and by the way, warm hydrogen peroxide does help), I got thinking of medical remedies from days of yore, some good, some bad.

There was the old mustard plaster for deep coughs. Don't try this one at home, Folks...or anywhere else. It consisted of a paste made from mustard powder, flour, and water or egg whites, mixed together and placed on a wet piece of cotton or muslin (gauze-like fabric) then laid on the chest. The concoction itself was not put directly on the skin, as that would cause blistering. Left on too long, it could lead to actual burning o' the skin. I only remember seeing this done once...thank goodness.

More widely-used for congestion, (still use it myself sometimes) is the Vicks Tent. This is when you melt some Vicks or another mentholatum product in a pan of hot water, throw a blanket over your shoulders like a tent and inhale deeply. You will not want to keep your eyes open while doing this, but I'll have to say it does provide some relief. You can rewarm the mixture several times, as needed. I don't know how effective it was, but Mother also used to pour rubbing alcohol on a dish cloth and pin it around our necks to relieve coughing. We called them "hulk a packs" and they weren't too bad. My dad used to HATE the smell of them, so we always teased him by seeing how close we could get to him when wearing them.

Mercurochrome was a product made of mercury & bromine; merthiolate, was a product made from mercury, sodium & iodine; they came in little glass bottles with little glass dipsticks and were used interchangeably to kill little bacteria in little kid's cuts. They also stung like a bee sting from Hades, merthiolate being even more pain-inducing. Tincture of iodine is what they throw at you from gallon buckets now prior to surgery, which seems to serve the same purpose. Merthiolate would sometimes be used to swab a sore throat, or you could gargle with a mixture of very warm water with enough salt in it to make you gag. It works but has the same short effectiveness as rubbing calamine lotion on an itch. Merthiolate's only good feature was that it was a magnificent orange/fuchsia color.

My dad used to get ringworm on his knuckles from milking cows (fungus or parasite, not a worm). It made a ring-shaped rash and he doctored it by using a product called new skin. I'm not sure what it was, but it hardened around the ring and seemed to work eventually.

Penicillin didn't always come in shots or pills. The doctor sometimes prescribed penicillin lozenges which came in both red and yellow, individually wrapped like Sunburst candies. The red ones were tolerable but the yellow ones were so bad you would almost rather suffer. They were stored in the refrigerator in a dark bottle like the ones you buy yeast in now.

If we were ever at Grandma Rice's and had a tummy ache, she would snare some of her peppermint leaves and make us peppermint tea, another nasty product that seemed to work. There was a liquid vitamin elixir named Vidaylin. I remember it tasted so good, that sometimes I took an extra dose.

For a tummy ache, there was always paragoric, which went down a little better with a bit of sugar and water. My recollection is that it tasted like bitter licorice. I do remember feeling a lot better immediately afterwards. Little did we realize it was "camphorated tincture of opium" which was highly misused for years, as was laudanum in previous centuries. Laudanum had an even higher concentration of opium than paragoric (but less than morphine), however, it was mixed with alcohol to give it a bit more kick. It's a wonder anybody survived. Wait...they didn't. Even after paregoric was taken off the market for humans, you could still get it without prescription for your farm animals. Moo.

Speaking of farm animals, there was some vividly-purple disinfectant (iodine?) that the farmer slathered all over the injured section of the animal. It had a wire dipstick with foam around it, that was pulled up through the narrow neck of the bottle to keep it from being too sloppy. That stuff worked every time!

One of the dumbest old treatments was putting butter immediately on a fresh burn. There was a bright yellow burn medicine in a tube called Furacin Cream which helped, as did aloe vera, but a burn is a burn.

If a kid got the chicken pox or the measles, everybody brought their kids over to the house for a sleepover in the hopes they would all catch whatever it was and "get it over with". It's hard to believe, but that's how it was done. There was some idea that you could only get German/Red measles, the more serious type, once, but you could get the regular measles up to three times. Mumps were considered more dangerous and I don't remember sleepovers to catch those. I do remember my dad getting them once, and when he couldn't make it out to milk the cows, we all thought he might be dying.

My personal cannot-do-without item for our medicine chest is polysporin. It's safe, non-addicting and borderline-magical. If you don't have any, you might wanna get some!

Elvis

Not Elvis Presley, nor even Elvis Stojko (the Canadian ice skater)

Today's blog is about Elvis, Elvis the Bird. You may not have heard of him, but he was pretty famous at 570 South Main Highway in Clifton.

When I was a kid, my dad hated magpies and was always figuring out ways to get rid of them. I thought they were kind of pretty but if he hated them, I figured there was probably a good reason. He said they were a filthy bird, but years later changed his mind when he realized how much they helped the environment.

Originally, magpies were simply called pie birds--for pied, or piebald...meaning black & white; the "mag" part was added to the "pie"...for reasons that make me queasy. I don't know why black & white cows are called holsteins, nor if the Pied Piper was pied, so you'll have to ask somebody else about that stuff.

From what I've studied, the black white magpies are called Holarctic, meaning living north of the equator; that must make me Holarctic, too. There are Oriental magpies that are blue and green. India has a beautiful turquoise-y bird called a green magpie. I don't recall seeing a magpie nest, but the pictures I found show them looking like most bird's nests, just with a dome. Magpies have long tails, generally half the length of their bodies. Their average life span is 4-6 years. Their chatter is noisy enough to be labeled obnoxious, a fact I can verify. They also hop around a lot. There was a poem in a little book we had around the house that went like this:

There was a little bird

That went hop hop hop,

And I cried: "Little bird,

Won't you stop stop stop?"

I was going to the window

To say: "How do you do?"

When he shook his little tail,

And far away he flew.

(I am constantly mystified as to why I can remember stuff like this and yet forget where I hid my grandkid's Christmas presents. I spent a couple of hours on Christmas Eve tearing the house apart looking for two such presents and finally found them in little bags under the tree...right where my granddaughter had put them two weeks before...when I asked her to wrap the presents.)

Studies suggest that magpies may mate for life, even staying together year-round. Studies can be whatever people make them, but Elvis and his wife spent their summers at the Magpie Riviera...atop my parent's house. I don't know when they named him, but probably at least not until he returned the second year, proving he wasn't fickle. I am assuming they named him Elvis because he sang a lot; perhaps they called his lady Priscilla. I should ask Mother sometime.

We would all be excited to hear when Elvis arrived each spring. Then one year Elvis came alone; it was pretty melancholy.

A year or so later, Elvis quit coming. We mourned.

A lesson in perspective...

It's A Mystery...

That would be my response if Alex Trebek were asking the question, rather than giving the answer, to "How did you get that collection of pens you have?"

The other day I was writing something and noticed some wording on the pen. That lead to a hunt-and-seek to see what other pens are lying around the house. Among my collection are pens from:

American Bank of Heber, Utah (not where I have ever banked)

Utah Collex Inc (whatever that is) from Payson, Utah

Walgreens

Zyrtec (a navy and lime-colored pen I got from the doctor one day. I was wearing a lime green shirt and navy blue pants and made a comment about matching the pen, and he handed it to me.)

Bilco Safe & Lock

A pen that looks like a candy cane

Utah Retirement Systems (every 22 years you get a free pen)

The Mending Shed, a fabulous little fix-it shop in Orem

And one from Disneyland (where I've never been) given to me by a co-worker.

My regular daily pen-of-choice is the good old all-blue Papermate. Once in a while, I'll get on a Bic kick, especially the "Round Stic". For years, I was legendary at work for only wanting the clear pen from Bic with the black ink (10 for $1.00), and considered it a personal challenge to use up every drop of ink, no doubt some inherited frugality issue. It's amazing how much you can get out of a pen even when it looks like it's empty. A couple of times I even wrapped some Scotch tape around the tip to hold it together til the ink was all gone. Pure satisfaction! However...if a pen starts to leak, whether old or brand new, I have no qualms whatsoever about throwing it in the nearest trash can.

Just out of curiosity (why are there so dang many pens around here?), I decided to count them...not every one in the house, under the beds, etc, mind you, just in the usual places. I was amazed to find we have more than 100 pens around here, and all of them have ink, so without ever buying another one, we are good to go for several lifetimes. However, Imelda Marcos-like, I know at some point, I will walk down an aisle sometime/somewhere and be overcome by the urge to buy another pen. It's my cheap thrill.

When I was a kid, The Lindy Co. (now defunct) made a wonderful line of "stick pens" with metal clips which came in several colors (13 to be exact) and two different lengths, @2-3 for a dollar, the only example of reverse-inflation in the universe. Now, if there's something neater than a regular pen, it's a pint-sized version. Oh, how I wish I had 100 Lindy pens lying around!

I own two pens used just for writing, and then only for serious writing. They are both silver and made by Cross. One is a man's pen and a little too fat for me to use comfortably. The other is a lady pen, not wonderfully slick like the fat pen and a little too trimline to keep a good grip. But, like Cinderella's step-sisters, I know a glass slipper when I see one :o)