When I was a kid, family friends came to stay a weekend with us. Their daughter (who we liked, so I suppose that makes her our friend, too) brought this case of professional colored pencils. They were smooth, matte black, with an inch of lacquered color at the unsharpened end to show what color you were grabbing. Coloring books were a waste of precious lead, so we dragged out all the drawing paper we could find, and pretended to be artists. I put that colored pencil set on my Christmas list for seven years.

I never did learn to draw.