The Smell of Old Pencils

     Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.  My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.   The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambiance of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slips an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing.