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| Like little wooden slices of heaven worth fighting and stealing for. |
We didn't have T.V. and my dad was in no way a sports fan but on
Thanksgiving and some Monday nights we would catch a little football.
In fifth-grade there were some pencil machines that sold NFL pencils
and all of the sudden some kids wanted to get all of the team pencils
and I got caught up in the hysteria and begged borrowed and stole as
many quarters as I could get my hands on. There were 26 teams at the
time and the San Francisco 49's were by far the most desirable. I
didn't know anything about football so I had two motivators; a
complete set and multiples of all of the cool teams. I would come
early on Tuesday's after they had filled the machine Monday night and
get to work collecting my pencils for the week. When you placed you quarter in the slot it made a satisfying mechanical Chachunk as it worked the giving gears of bounty.
Chachunk - Bills - meh.
Chachunk - Jets - okay.
Chachunk - Bengals - sweet.
Chachunk - Oilers-what the hell is an oiler?
Chachunk - Oilers again? Gosh
dang stupid waste of a flipping quarter.
Come on! Big money! No
whammies - show me the Forty-Niners, please, please, please.
Chachunk- the Browns? The Browns? The
damn Browns? Oh, how like flies to wanton boys are pencil collector
boys to the gods.
I ended up buying about sixty pencils to get the
full set and then sold the duplicates that I could sometimes at a loss
to unload the unsavory ones. Once I had the set that was it I lost
interest and didn't care about the NFL until I was an adult looking
for a good way to while away a lazy Sunday. I don't have the pencils
I think my mom may have allowed my siblings to sharpen and use them
like the were regular pencils and not imbued with the magical
talismanic powers of a Buccaneer or Ram.
