You can find moments in your past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna noisy . grades, a quiet girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t recognize how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here that comes in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.


I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in to a mud-bath. It took us months to master the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you wanted to save time, you would be far wiser to play the tortoise.

But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we remained as stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.

From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God knowning that the actual writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the method that you control a lot of it.” There was clearly anything more that should be controlled as well, in accordance with Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked over her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a timely, thin line over Anna’s script; the blotter followed; there came more red lines, more words slashed away.

I watched Anna after she returned to her desk. She began writing, dabbing the blotter after her pen in true Sister Mary Michael fashion. For a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it absolutely was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a spot in the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the spot and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with the nib as well as the blotch became a part of chocolate, its center dissolving in to a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper and more dabs before entire blotter become a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to another; she paused just long enough to thicken the center stretch without breaking the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat for my child desk just like a chocolate web.

It turned out a young type of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite see that.
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