A Thank-You Note

choi

Michael PH Stanley, A Thank-You Note Helped Me Find My Calling; It spurred a friendship, then years later, a visit to a clinic, There I realized I was to become a doctor. Wall Street Journal, Dec 29, 2019 (op-ed).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-t ... calling-11577484308

Quote::

(a) "One summer during my middle-school years, my hometown put on a series of concerts in the park. I played the keyboard, and a reporter from a local newspaper interviewed me. My father's friend Don Hardy cut the interview out of the newspaper, laminated  it, and mailed it to me. It was a nice thing for him to to do, and I told my dad to tell Mr Hardy 'thank you' from me.

"I quickly forgot Mr. Hardy's act of kindness until two weeks later, when I received a strange package in the mail. It contained an envelope, a stamp, a blank sheet of paper and a golf pencil. 'What's the meaning of this?' I asked my dad, who chuckled and told me I'd have to figure it out on my own. Eventually, I realized that Mr Hardy was sending me a message: Always remember to write a thank-you note. Later, my father told me that Mr Hardy had given him advance warning of the lesson. He thought I might be destined for big things in a world where those little touches would make a difference, and so he wanted to fortify the habit of giving thanks.

(b) "Dr Stanley is a resident in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

My comment:
(a) There sis no need to read the rest, which is not well written. Apparently Dr Stanley is just like you and me, a nobody.
(b) golf pencil
*i) pencil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil
("Golf pencils are usually short (a common length is 9 cm (3.5 in)) and very cheap. They are also known as library pencils, as many libraries offer them as disposable, unspillable writing instruments")
(B) Caroline Weaver, A Few Words About Golf Pencils. CW Pencil Enterprise, July 10, 2016
https://cwpencils.com/blogs/news/golf-pencils
("Have you ever sharpened and re-used a golf pencil? If you have, you're probably in the minority.  * * * Usually I brought my own, but on the odd occasion I didn't have one I did exactly what everyone else did: I used the club provided version and threw it away immediately after the round. Eventually I began to understand why they're preferred. They're short so they can fit in a pocket or be stored with your tees, if you lose them (which is easy to do when you're lugging a bag of clubs around for hours) it's not a huge deal because they're cheap and plentiful and they don't have erasers so it's harder to cheat (I made that one up, but doesn't it make sense?)")