There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in early grades, a nice girl who, if she remained alive, does not recognize how during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here links in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
We have often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades within the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough 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; should you really wanted to save time, you’d be far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali if we remained stuck within the grade 3 reader; within the fourth grade, when people with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.
I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God knowning that the 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 we control some of it.” There was clearly anything more that should be controlled at the same time, according to 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 checked out her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a timely, 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 as though Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place at the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the location and watched the darkness grow; several details using the nib along with the blotch became a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper and more dabs prior to the entire blotter changed into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to another; she paused just good enough to thicken the middle stretch acquiring to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat to be with her desk being a chocolate web.
It had been a young version of Acid Art, so distinctive it made hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite note that.
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