There are moments within our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna during the early grades, a nice girl who, if she remained alive, doesn’t know how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which will come in handy for parents and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in school. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult 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 art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save time, choosing far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we remained stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all 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 inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by how we control a lot of it.” There was clearly anything more that must be controlled too, according to 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 looked over 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 as if Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area on top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the spot and watched the darkness grow; several details together with the nib as well as the blotch was a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus more dabs prior to the entire blotter converted into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
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 of sufficient length to thicken the center 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 to be with her desk being a chocolate web.
It had been an earlier type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
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