You will find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, a quiet girl who, if she were still alive, will not understand how even in grade 4, she was pointing how you can 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 could have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in class. Kids 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 in a mud-bath. It took us months to learn the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you wanted to save lots of time, choosing far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali if we were still stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God knowning that the true writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the method that you control the ink.” There was clearly anything more that must be controlled also, based on 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 hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna looked over her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a timely, 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. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it absolutely was the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area on the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib during lots of and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details with the nib as well as the blotch has been a part of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus more dabs prior to the entire blotter turned into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another; she paused just long enough to thicken the middle stretch without having to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat on her behalf desk like a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an early on sort of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made flowing hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
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