You buy a yellow pencil the day your child is born. It will be handy to mark his height on the door frame each time you measure once he learns to stand.
When he starts school, you tuck the pencil into his backpack and he will write his first words with it.
On Halloween he will dress up as an absent minded professor and insert the pencil above his ear to look like Einstein.
On his high school graduation day, you use the pencil to mark where the screw will be placed on the wall to hang up his diploma.
Many sharpenings and yellow shavings later your son has a daughter. She drops a toy down the drain of the bathroom sink. He reaches for his trusty pencil because it is soft, won’t scratch the porcelain, but long enough to fish out the toy.
As a grandmother, you go to your son’s house to babysit your granddaughter. She wants to draw, but her mom doesn’t allow pens or markers that will stain her teak table, so you use the beloved pencil. It has now been sharpened to half the size, and fits perfectly inside her tiny hand. You teach her how to hold it properly, and together you draw funny pictures with it.
The cost of the pencil was pennies.
The value is priceless.
previously published on Medium