You’ll find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in early grades, a basic girl who, if she were alive, doesn’t discover how even in grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which comes in handy for parents and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken a different 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 in school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough 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 learn the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you wanted to save lots of time, you would be far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring ways to Bali if we were stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find no 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 understanding that the writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon how you control some of it.” There were anything else that would have 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 on 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 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 some time, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it absolutely was the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a spot on the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details with all the nib and also the blotch was a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper plus much more dabs prior to the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to another location; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the middle stretch having to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat for my child desk being a chocolate web.
It turned out a young sort of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite see that.
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