There are moments within our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she remained as alive, won’t understand how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here that comes in handy for folks and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters in class. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in 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 to avoid wasting time, selecting far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we remained as stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find no 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 understanding that the real writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the method that you control a lot of it.” There was clearly anything more that would have to be controlled as well, 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 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 quite a while, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it had been the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area at the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the area and watched the darkness grow; a number of details using the nib and the blotch was a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus much more dabs prior to the entire blotter become some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to the next; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the very center stretch without breaking the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat on her desk as being a chocolate web.
It had been an early form of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made your hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite note that.
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