You can find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in the early grades, an abandoned girl who, if she were still alive, doesn’t understand how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which will come in handy for fogeys and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in class. Kids 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 into a mud-bath. It took us months to learn the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you really wanted in order to save time, choosing far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a method to Bali whenever we were still stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she can find no more 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 and that the real writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon the way you control some of it.” There were anything more that needed to be controlled at the same time, according to 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 looked at 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 quite a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it had been the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location in the top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib during the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with the nib along with the blotch became a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and more dabs prior to the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another location; she paused just long enough to thicken the very center stretch without having to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat to be with her desk like a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an earlier sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite note that.
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