Tonight: A brief word about pencils.

But first, our dog Tango, who tonight on the campus of Western Washington University surprised a six-point whitetail deer and chased it for about a quarter of a mile. Spoiler alert: The deer escaped.

Tango’s behavior taught me never to let her off the leash on campus again. But it also, in a weird way, reminded me of my Dad and how we both loved office supplies. When I was in high school and we found out that a local “stationery store” was having a going-out-of-business sale, we RAN to the car. We chased bargains, not ruminants.

Most office-supply stores today belong to a chain and everyone sells the same thing, but with different packaging and different celebrity endorsers. The last time a stationery store in my area expired, it was 20 years ago, we lived in Portland, Oregon, and the best treasure I came home with was the colorful stickers we stuck on floppy disks in the 1980s.

Before Dad went to that great office-supply ammunition dump in the sky, he gave me all of the unopened boxes of pencils he’s been accumulating since he came home from World War II. I ended up donating many to an elementary school; a teacher there told me that his third- and fourth-graders chewed right through them. I sold other pencils on eBay. I still have enough to last me my lifetime.

There’s something about pencils, and their fragrance, that makes you happy. Like skipping stones. You can’t skip a stone and not be happy. You can’t open a box of pencils and not feel happy looking at all that unsharpened potential.

Two writers who have meant a lot to me, Thomas Wolfe and John Updike, wrote with pencils.

Wolfe, who was six and a half feet tall, used the top of a refrigerator as his desk. His preferred tool was a pencil almost as thick as a crayon. He scrawled 20 or 25 words on a page, then swept the page off the fridge and started on the next.

Updike, who liked to sit in a chair, wrote Couples and three of the four Rabbit books with a pencil.

Am I going to write the next draft of my novel with a pencil? How about hell no? I have about the same chance of finishing such a thing as I have of catching a deer.

I didn’t write this post with a pencil, either, but I did use a pencil (a Wolkins “Debut”) to write my to-do list today. And I’m now using a pencil (a red PMC Tailoring Pencil No. 249, proudly made in the U.S.A.) to cross out BLOG.

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” (G.K. Chesterton)