You can find moments in your past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in the early grades, a basic girl who, if she were still alive, doesn’t recognize how even in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.


I have often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in class. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you wanted to save lots of time, you would be far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali when we were still stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when people with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she may find no more passionate than Japanese prints.

I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God and that the true writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the way you control some of it.” There is much else that needed to be controlled at the same time, based on Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down at the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked at her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, 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 quite a while, it seemed as if Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it absolutely was the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a spot in the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with all the nib and also the blotch was a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and more dabs before the entire blotter become a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to the next; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the very center stretch without breaking the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat on her behalf desk as being a chocolate web.

It absolutely was a young sort of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made flowing hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite notice that.
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