You’ll find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in early grades, a basic girl who, if she were still alive, will not discover how during grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here which will come in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.
I have often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in college. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult 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 learn the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we were still stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.
Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God knowning that the true writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the way you control some of it.” There was clearly much else that needed to be controlled at the same time, 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 hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna looked over 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 a while, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area in the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the area and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib and the blotch became a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus more dabs before 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 now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to the next; she paused just good enough to thicken the middle stretch without breaking the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat to be with her desk being a chocolate web.
It had been an early on sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite notice that.
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