The Pen
By
Ronnie Lee Jeffires
A pen is a common instrument that is daily used by everyone.
Once a young boy found a pen in his grandfather’s nightstand and asked him if he could keep it. The grandfather told his grandson that he could keep it, and also asked what he planned to do with it. To which the grandson replied that he longed to be a writer. The boy’s grandfather told him that he should make sure that being a writer was what he really wanted to do, because writers wielded much power and with that power came responsibility.
The boy being of a very young age quickly told his grandfather that he was sure of his path and put the pen in his pocket. The boy treasured the pen and wrote stories about dragons, dinosaurs, and other assorted fairytales, but as the boy got older even though he continued to write diligently and passionately he soon realized that his boyhood writings of dragons, dinosaurs, and fairytales had evolved into deeper subjects of love, friendships, and romance.
Many years later the boy was no longer a boy, but an old man with silver hair and wrinkled calloused skin as his grandfather had been. The old man still wrote every day, but his stories now spoke of lessons learned, regrets, and distant memories.
It was in this ripe old age that the old man finally realized what his grandfather had meant by saying “With writing comes great responsibility.” Because as writers, the pen is more than just what we use to put the words on the page, the pen is also a storehouse of memories, some good, some bad, and some we try to forget. The ink within a pen is usually blue or black, but the colors they produce in the mind’s eye are much more vivid, from the green grass of spring to the grey clouds of winter.
A writer must live their life in such a manner that they enjoy it because whatever a writer’s life is filled with, the pen will be filled with as well. With writing comes great responsibility.
