You’ll find moments in our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she were still alive, doesn’t know how even during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which will come in handy for parents and grandparents.
I have often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters at school. Children 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 in a mud-bath. It took us months to master ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you really wanted to avoid wasting time, selecting far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a way to Bali once we were still stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can 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 action of God knowning that the real writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control some of it.” There was clearly anything else that should 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 at the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna checked out her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a timely, little difference 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. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area in the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with all the nib and the blotch had been a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus more dabs until the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to the next; she paused just good enough to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat for my child desk just like a chocolate web.
It turned out a young type of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite observe that.
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