You will find moments in your past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, does not discover how during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which will come in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters at school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to master ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save time, selecting far wiser to play the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we were stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.
From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God knowning that the real writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on how you control a lot of it.” There was anything more that would have to 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 on 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 fast, 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 time, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it absolutely was the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location at the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of lots of and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details together with the nib as well as 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 plus more dabs before entire blotter converted into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From 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 from one corner to another; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the guts stretch having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat for my child desk being a chocolate web.
It turned out an earlier sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite observe that.
For more details about Blotter Art view this site: check it out