There are moments inside our past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna in the early grades, a quiet girl who, if she remained alive, does not know how even in grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here links in handy for folks and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken another turn had she lived her early grades from 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 hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to learn ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you really wanted to avoid wasting time, selecting far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we remained stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when people with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she can find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.
I remember 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 from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the way you control some of it.” There were anything more that would have 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 at 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 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 quite a while, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location on top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib and the blotch was a part of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and more dabs until the entire blotter turned into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the very center stretch without breaking the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat for my child desk being a chocolate web.
It absolutely was an earlier type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
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