I'm visiting my sister at NYU. While in her dorm room I noticed a sticker of a yearbook senior photo of some guy stuck on her radiator. I asked her about it and she replied, "Oh, that's Sticker Steve. The yearbook screwed up his picture and gave him thousands of stickers with his picture on it. We've pasted them all over our home town and even in Europe."

It reminded me of when I was ten and my grandparents gave me thousands of pencils with my name on them. Maybe it wasn't thousands, but it was enough to create a diaspora of pencils over the next few years to the far reaches of my local universe. Without any apparent effort on my part, my pencils turned up everywhere and were often seen in the hands of people with little or no connection to me. One time someone saw the Korean owner of the local corner store near my junior high writing with one of my pencils. Even after I graduated high school, my pencils could still be occassionally found in my aunt's desk. I couldn't get rid of them.

While hearing about Sticker Steve I realized that I no longer own a single one of those pencils and I felt strangely sad. When an era is finally over I always wonder why I was so eager for it to pass?

Just for today, I can own my pencil legacy.