Stationery stores. I miss stationery stores. All kinds of things to write with and write on and to send writing to each other. Tough wooden things and cold shiny metallic things and onion skin paper so fragile if you even looked at it you had to buy it. And pens, all kinds of pens, back when pens exhibited alpha male masculinity, heavy and thick and ridiculous and they gleamed like armor in the sun. A whole sort of civilization disappeared when stationery stores disappeared. I live in the new civilization and I’m typing in it now, pecking on this ridiculous keyboard, and I can’t for the life of me remember what onion skin paper was for. Nor can I get my mind around the idea that a ball point pen once cost more to someone in 1946 than we spend for an iPad now.