You will find moments within our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna in early grades, an abandoned girl who, if she remained alive, does not understand how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.
We have often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken another turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save time, you would be far wiser to experience the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali if we remained stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she may find no more passionate than Japanese prints.
Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God which the actual writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control a lot of it.” There were anything else that needed to 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 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 a fast, 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 as if Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it turned out the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a spot at the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; several details together with the nib as well as the blotch was a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and much more dabs before entire blotter turned into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than 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 without having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat for my child desk just like a chocolate web.
It had been an early on type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite observe that.
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