A Fountain Pen Scribe's Ode to a Typewriter

I stood there, just 15, clutching a $30 check from a magazine for something I'd written, the first ever for my writing, growing dizzy with images in my head of where I needed to be.

- JEFFREY ROBINSON

Paris. In the rain. Ducking into a warm café to claim an empty wooden table at the back.

Nursing my grand crème while scribbling flowing exposition and biting dialogue into my leather Moleskine notebook with my Montegrappa pen. Just like Ernest Hemingway all those years ago.

His love letter to Paris, A Moveable Feast, had awakened my $30 fortune with yearning. In that memoir, Hemingway wrote: "It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write..."

Wait. What? Stop. A pencil? What happened to his Montegrappa?

Everyone knows that Hemingway discovered Montegrappas long before he discovered Paris. It was in Italy, during World War 1 when he was an ambulance driver stationed near the company's factory. He wrote with Montegrappas.

Hemingway was Montegrappa.

Hemingway was not a pencil!

Now what? Without access to that factory 4,200 miles away in Italy or to a Montegrappa anywhere in New York that didn't require a bank loan, all that was left was to commandeer my late grandfather's vintage-1920s Parker Big Red. My mother was fine with that, but she put her foot down when it came to the Parisian café. "You are not moving to France. Go do your homework."

That didn't happen until 10 years later. France, that is. Thinking back, the homework probably didn't get done at all.

But a pencil? They're fine for crossword puzzles. And for the counter guy at the diner who takes your order and chews on it.