You will find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t discover how during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which comes in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.
I have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using 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 in a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to avoid wasting time, choosing far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring ways to Bali if we remained as stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might 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 and that the true writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on how you control some of it.” There was much else that would have to be controlled too, based on Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna viewed her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, thin line 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 like Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it turned out the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a place in the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of lots of and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details with the nib as well as the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper plus much more dabs prior to the entire blotter turned into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to a higher; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the middle stretch acquiring 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 as being a chocolate web.
It had been an early on sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite note that.
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