McKinnon asked me not to advertise the fact, but that sign saying that the museum is under twenty-four-hour surveillance came with the house. There is not a lot of pencil-sharpener-related crime in the Hocking Hills.
While we were talking, I had an idea. I was traveling with a black KUM long-point sharpener, and I didn’t see anything like it in the collection. It was the handheld model I had seen at the pencil party; I had ordered so many pencils that Cal Cedar threw in a free sharpener. I loved having it with me, to sharpen pencils on the go or to whip out in a café if a friend’s point had gotten dull. The collection included some double-hole sharpeners, and McKinnon had assumed, as many people do, that one hole was for regular pencils and the other for colored pencils. I explained how it worked: the cylinders beneath the blades are angled differently, and each pencil goes first in one hole, for whittling away the wood, and then in the other, for grinding the graphite. McKinnon seemed genuinely interested, though I did not test her interest by going into detail about the way I like to keep the lid up while I’m in the wood hole, so that the shaving can unfurl all in one piece. It’s a little like trying to peel an apple in one continuous strip: the shaving comes out in a paper-thin spiral, and the hexagonal shape of the pencil produces a pinking-shear effect edged with the color of the pencil shaft, a satisfying deep gray in the case of the Blackwing 602. It looks like a tiny tiered skirt for a toothpick doll. I have had people, even fellow pencil fanciers, back away from me when I describe this, although they might be tempted to do it themselves, in private. I perch the intact spirals on the shelf and there they remain, until some puzzled cleaning lady throws them away.
I went back to my car, found the pencil sharpener just where I had packed it, in a pocket of the zippered compartment on my backpack, and photographed it on the back of my car before shaking out the shavings in the parking lot. I did not want the fact that my sharpener was not a virgin to make it ineligible for display in the museum.
“I can tell you right now that we don’t have this,” McKinnon said. I was thrilled. I felt as if I were a part of southern Ohio pencil history. She grabbed her keys, and we went back out to the museum. “Where will it fit?” I said. The sharpeners were crowded into their arrangements on the shelves. McKinnon decided that it belonged with the other two-hole sharpeners (but not the noses). She unlocked the door and swung it open, shoved the museum pieces together a little, and gave my black Palomino Blackwing long-point a prominent position at the front of the case. I was hoping she’d open some more of the glass doors so that I could take pictures without the glare, but my mission was accomplished at the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum, so I let Susie go back to her office and I hit the road.
* * *
1 Flash: They restocked! I bought two boxes.
Epilogue
THE MILLION-DOLLAR COPY EDITOR
THE WORDS “MILLIONAIRE” AND “COPY EDITOR” hardly ever land in the same sentence, much less describe the same person, but Lu Burke was that rare thing: a copy editor who became a millionaire. She worked at The New Yorker from 1958 to 1990, when she retired to Southbury, Connecticut, and a year after she died, in October 2010, reportedly of leukemia, it emerged that Lu had willed her entire estate, of more than a million dollars, to the Southbury Public Library. I used to stop and see her once in a while on my way to Massachusetts, and we’d have lunch at Friendly’s, but with Lu hungry for gossip about the old crew, a visit could turn a three-and-half-hour drive into a daylong journey. By the time she died, I hadn’t seen her in years, and I felt bad about that, so finding out that Lu had been sitting on a million dollars made me feel a little better.
Lu had always been protective of her privacy, so skilled at deflecting any personal questions that it was not until her will was probated, and a writer for Connecticut Magazine started calling up and asking questions, that we realized we didn’t know the first thing about her. We knew she liked Trollope and loved jazz. She lived on Horatio Street, in Greenwich Village. She once dated J. D. Salinger. Back in the sixties, she had written letters to the Village Voice, tangling with Norman Mailer. On one occasion, she told a co-worker that the happiest time of her life was the summer she spent at a camp where she was issued a bugle and blew reveille every morning. But we didn’t know where she was from, or where she had gone to school, or what her real first name was—Lu had to be short for something.
At Pomperaug Woods, an assisted-living center in Southbury that she moved into from the retirement community of Heritage Village, Lu disdained to join the other residents in the dining room, preferring to carry her meals up to her apartment and dine alone. A story that made the rounds after her death was that once, while waiting for the elevator, she beckoned to a fellow resident and asked, “Would you do me a favor?” And when the woman said yes, Lu told her, “Drop dead.”