You can find moments in your past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna during the early grades, a basic girl who, if she remained as alive, won’t know how during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for folks and grandparents.


We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to learn the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a method to Bali whenever we remained as stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.

I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God which the writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control some of it.” There was clearly anything else that must be controlled also, as outlined by Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down on the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna viewed her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a fast, 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 time, it seemed as if Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place on the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; several details with the nib and the blotch became a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper and more dabs prior to the entire blotter become a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to another location; she paused just long enough to thicken the center stretch without breaking the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat on her behalf desk just like a chocolate web.

It absolutely was a young type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite note that.
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