Have You Hugged Your Pencil Today?

Have you hugged your pencil today? One of the greatest inventions of mankind. Remember pre ball point pens days? Where would you have been without a pencil? Your school career depended on it. And I guess for some, your school career ended because of it. How did they do the 12 x 12 tables without a pencil? Pebbles, match sticks? I dread to even imagine.
The classroom would have only one sharpener. Up there, you could look over the whole class and make faces at the teacher behind her back. Your best friend could come up and it would be the equivalent of the water cooler. But soon you would have to return to your seat since your pencil was now only a nub.
Every year, you could count on getting a pencil box for a gift, at least once. Armed with a pencil box full of pencils, you could write an amount your brain could never remember. Homework, shopping lists. Well maybe not shopping lists. Olden days shopping lists wern't that hot. What would you see on them? Coffee,sugar, flour, bullets? Some people had pencils behind their ears to show how busy they were. And do you know what was best of all, pencils never ran out of ink.