You’ll find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in the early grades, a quiet girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t recognize how even in grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There is a lesson here links in handy for parents and grandparents.
We have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties when 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 into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you wanted to save time, choosing far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a means to Bali if we remained as stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might find no 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 which the true writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the method that you control the ink.” There were anything else that needed to 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 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 an easy, 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 when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a spot in the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details together with the nib as well as the blotch was a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper plus more dabs prior to the entire blotter turned into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat for my child desk being a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an early on form of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite note that.
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