There are moments inside our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna in early grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, will not know how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which comes 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 within the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in college. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted in order to save time, you’d be far wiser to play the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a way to Bali whenever we were stuck within the grade 3 reader; within the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find anything passionate than Japanese prints.
From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God knowning that the real writer would find his share of godliness within the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon how you control a lot of it.” There is anything else that would have to be controlled also, in accordance with Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in 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 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 while, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it absolutely was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area on top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the area and watched the darkness grow; a number of details using the nib and the blotch has been a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper and much more dabs until the entire blotter turned into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another location; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the center stretch having to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat to be with her desk being a chocolate web.
It turned out an earlier version of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite see that.
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