You can find moments in our past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, a quiet girl who, if she were alive, doesn’t know how even during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here which comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
We have often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades within the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in college. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing hard 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 understand ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a way to Bali when we were stuck within the grade 3 reader; within the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she may find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God which the true writer would find his share of godliness within the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control a lot of it.” There is anything more that should be controlled also, as outlined by 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 checked out 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 a time, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a spot at the 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 and the blotch became a part of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and much more dabs before entire blotter changed into a kind 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 from corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the guts stretch having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat for my child desk as being a chocolate web.
It had been an earlier sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite note that.
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