You can find moments in our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna noisy . grades, a quiet girl who, if she remained alive, won’t know how even in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here that comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters at school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you wanted to avoid wasting time, choosing far wiser to experience the tortoise.
But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a way to Bali when we remained stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she might find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act 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 how you control a lot of it.” There was clearly much else that would have to be controlled also, according to 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 hard 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, 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 realized that it was the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location at the top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location 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 around the absorbent paper and more dabs before the entire blotter become some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond 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 good enough to thicken the center stretch without having to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat for my child desk as being a chocolate web.
It turned out a young form of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made nice hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite notice that.
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