No. 2 Pencil ✏️
Abandonment or Placement?
This spring season I was called back to my Alma Mater to share a stage and offer words of encouragement to the next generation of leaders. And amidst all the pomp and circumstance and dawned regalia, I found myself immobilized by the most innocuous sighting.
A No. 2 pencil. ✏️
Traversing the campus of The Johns Hopkins University following the delivery of a speech at the Class of 2026 Commencement Ceremony, I was feeling rather emotional. Dare I say nostalgic? I maintain a complicated relationship with nostalgia.
I felt called after all the fanfare to retrace the steps of my own academic adulting evolution, built by learning journeys and heavy heartbreaks across the four years that preceded the marking of the millennium. I found my way to the Freshmen Quad, and gave a little head nod to Room 326 in Clark Hall. And forgave that kid who laid his head there each night, scared and studious.
I walked over to where I called home during my first year as a Residential Advisor (RA). Only this time I thought about all those young people, whose minds and hearts I looked after. And I gave a little salute. Wherever they are now, I know those freshman in 1998 will never forget the name of their first RA.
What they don’t know, probably to this day, is that they saved me.
I was aimless and listless and struggling for purpose. I found it suddenly in caring for some 60 souls and minds spread across two floors of Vincent-Willard. Each dorm had their own stairway and entryway, but for me it was always the bridge I chose to walk that made that place special. I can still hear the laughter and the tears and the occasional lacrosse ball bouncing off the wall. It always sounded a bit like a heartbeat. Those 18 year old dreamers were a heartbeat. I hope their hearts beats strong today, wherever they are.
Which brings me back to our provocateur. The No. 2 Pencil. The small assembly of wood, graphite, and rubber that stopped me mid step with the power of a border checkpoint. It caught my eye, and captured my heart, illuminated in the evening sun, alone on the brick pathway leading to the 103 year old Alumni Memorial Residences.
There I stood, an alumnus who called this place home, and made it home for others for a while. An alumnus who had just welcomed in 900 more heartbeats into a community that keeps him alive. An alumnus who in that very moment felt as alone as an abandoned No. 2 pencil on a red brick pathway on a college campus at graduation. Solitude is a siren’s song.
The Story Before It Found Me
What was the story of that writing instrument before it found me, before it stopped me? Had some student been running to make it in time for their graduation only to drop a pencil amidst their truancy? Had some professor let it slip out of a legal pad carrying half-finished musings for the year ahead? Perhaps it was an escapee from the forthcoming razing and renovations about to commence on the Freshman Quad? Leaping out of it’s eviction and foreclosure like Marcellus the Octupus in Remarkably Bright Creatures (which if you haven’t seen yet, you must).
I want to believe it was an escapee trying to honor its past shaping while yearning for the chance to write another chapter for some wayfaring wanderer. Perhaps this writing instrument found me, and not the other way around. As a reminder of the stories we write sometimes starting in the hand of one human and continuing in another. And so it goes.
But I left wondering who did this pencil belong to before and what journey did it help them set out on? I may never know. I may not need to know. For what is to be known will be shown. As plainly as a No. 2 pencil on a brick pathway in an evening light.
I snapped this photo, to remember the moment and this sensation, because even amidst a roaring crowd, or at a podium on a grand stage, or in a walk across a bustling campus, loneliness finds its grip.
A grip meant for holding a No. 2 Pencil and writing the next great story.
Bill, the thing that held me is that you let the pencil stay genuinely ambiguous — abandonment or placement — rather than resolving it into a tidy lesson, because the loneliness you're describing lives precisely in not knowing which one you are at any given moment. A stage full of people you've just welcomed, and the same evening you feel like the dropped thing on the brick: I don't read that as a contradiction, so much as the particular cost of being the one who holds others, since the holding doesn't get returned to you automatically, and you feel the asymmetry most sharply right after you've done the most of it. (You stopped me cold with "the power of a border checkpoint," for reasons you can probably guess.) What stays with me, though, is your choosing not to know whose pencil it was. The wanting-to-know is the reflex; letting it be shown rather than solved is the harder discipline — and it's the same one that lets a found object keep carrying a story forward instead of closing it off.