You will find moments in your past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, will not understand how during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here which comes in handy for folks and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing 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 learn the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you wanted to avoid wasting time, selecting far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali whenever we were stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all 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 knowning that the real writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the way you control the ink.” There were much else 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 with the child, her eyes blue and hard 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, 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 some time, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it turned out the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place in the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details together with the nib along with the blotch had been a part of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and more dabs until the entire blotter converted into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to the next; she paused just good enough to thicken the very center stretch without breaking the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat on her desk being a chocolate web.
It was an earlier type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite observe that.
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