You can find moments in our past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she remained as alive, won’t discover how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which will come in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken some other turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters at school. 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 in a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you wanted to save time, you would be far wiser to play the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a method to Bali when we remained as stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all 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 understanding that the real writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how we control some of it.” There were anything else that must 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 hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna checked out her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, little difference 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 when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a spot in the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the spot and watched the darkness grow; several details using the nib and the blotch had been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper and more dabs until the entire blotter turned into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to another location; she paused just good enough to thicken the middle stretch without breaking the flow until 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 earlier version of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite note that.
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