You can find moments in your past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, a quiet girl who, if she were still alive, won’t discover how even in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties when 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 into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to avoid wasting time, you would be 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 were still stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she may find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God which the writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon how you control a lot of it.” There was clearly anything more that needed to be controlled as well, according to Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down at 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 a fast, 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 that Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a spot at the top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib during the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details using the nib and the blotch became a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper plus more dabs before entire blotter turned into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to the next; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the very center stretch having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat on her desk being a chocolate web.
It turned out an early type of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made your hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite see that.
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