You will find moments in your past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, an abandoned girl who, if she were alive, won’t know how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here which will come in handy for folks and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters at school. Kids 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; if you really wanted to save lots of time, you would be far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali when we were 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 nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God which the actual writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the method that you control a lot of it.” There was clearly 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 viewed 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 some time, it seemed as if 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 spot in the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details together with the nib and also 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 converted into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the middle stretch without breaking the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat for my child desk like a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an early on sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite observe that.
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