You’ll find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, a basic girl who, if she were still alive, doesn’t know how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken another turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters in 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 into a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you really wanted to save time, selecting far wiser to experience the tortoise.
But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a way to Bali whenever we were still stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could 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 understanding that the writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon the way you control the ink.” There is anything more that should be controlled too, in accordance with 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 difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna looked at her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a quick, 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 while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place at the top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of lots of and watched the darkness grow; a few details with all the nib along with the blotch became a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper and much more dabs before the entire blotter changed into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to a higher; she paused just long enough to thicken the guts stretch acquiring to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat to be with her desk just like a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an early version of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite notice that.
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