You will find moments within our 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, does not discover how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here which will come in handy for parents and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters at school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you wanted in order to save time, selecting far wiser to play the tortoise.
But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali if we were still stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when people with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she may find nothing more 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 understanding that the actual writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how we control a lot of it.” There was clearly anything else that would have to be controlled at the same time, according to 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 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 quite a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place on top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details using the nib along with the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and more dabs until the entire blotter become a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to the next; she paused just long enough to thicken the middle stretch having to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat for my child desk just like a chocolate web.
It had been a young form of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite note that.
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