There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna during the early grades, a basic girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here links in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in school. Children 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 in to a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you really wanted in order to save time, selecting far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali once we remained as stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might find nothing at all 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 actual 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 is dependent upon how we control a lot of it.” There is anything more that should 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 with the child, her eyes blue and difficult 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 quick, 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 while, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it absolutely was the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area in the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details using the nib and also the blotch was a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in to a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and more dabs before the entire blotter changed into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to a higher; she paused just long enough to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat for my child desk as being a chocolate web.
It was a young sort of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite note that.
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