PRESSED PRESSED

By Dorette Rota Jackson

by DORETTE ROTA JACKSON

We’ve been going crazy for the last few months. It’s getting to the point where we live out of my car. Dawn hates my PT Cruiser. She said we look like the Baldwin sisters from Walton’s Mountain. If you’re too young to remember Walton’s Mountain, don’t worry about it. You probably wouldn’t get the humor anyway. As you can imagine, the cell phone rings. A lot. And we never have a pen around when we need one. Except for the hook & eye. That’s what we call this ugly gray pen with a huge metal hook at one end of it. The pen itself is half the size of a real pen and twice as fat. It’s the most ridiculous excuse for a writing implement we’ve ever seen. Strange thing about the hook & eye. Neither of us knows where it came from. My sister said it’s a bad omen. Some kind of jinx pen that pops up unexpectedly to keep us grounded. I figured she might be onto something. So, I tossed it into the recycling bucket outside her house. Adieu bad karma! The next morning, we left the coffee shop by 9 and headed for our 30-minute workout at Fast & Fit. Dawn doesn’t believe in turning the cell phone off for a halfhour while we exercise. She says it pumps her up to listen to her coat pocket ring 40 times as she wrestles with the gut buster machine. As we sweat our way back to the Cruiser, Dawn dials voice mail. Every day is Groundhog Day in the Cruiser. Dawn listens to the messages without a pen or paper in her hand. Her idea of efficient phone follow-up is shouting the names and numbers of the callers out to me to memorize while I drive us to our next appointment. ‘It’s a guy named Steve. He wants us to drop off ad rates. Before noon. Remember this number – 267.249.7863.’ Then she hits the erase button. Same routine for the next 20 calls, then she asks, ‘What was that guy Steve’s number?’ I shoot her the look. Followed by the speech. “Why can’t you get a pen and paper out BEFORE you listen to the messages? How do you expect me to remember names and phone numbers and drive the car at the same time?”

‘This car is ridiculous,’ she counters. ‘I don’t even have my own arm rest.’ Then she frantically searches the glove compartment, the cup holders, the door panels, for a pen. I’ll never forget the panicked look in her eyes when she reached under the seat and came up with the short, stubby pen with a metal clasp at the end. The hook & eye. ‘I thought you threw this in the trash.’ “I did,” I answered in a low, deliberate tone. “How did it get back in the car”? I asked. We each came up with a handful of possible explanations. Maybe there were two pens. ‘No, this is the same pen,’ she shot back. ‘I used the hook to pry the window open the other day. Remember? I was locked out. I scratched it up. See?’ We spent the rest of the day asking everyone about the hook & eye. No one knew what we were talking about. No one cared about the pudgy pen. Except Dawn. ‘You know. This pen has energy. Maybe