You will find moments in your past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna during the early grades, a nice girl who, if she were still alive, won’t discover 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 folks and grandparents.

We have often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades within the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in school. 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 the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted to save lots of time, you would be far wiser to play the tortoise.

But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali once we were still stuck within the grade 3 reader; within the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.

I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God and that the actual writer would find his share of godliness within the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on how we control the ink.” There was clearly much else that must be controlled at the same time, as outlined by 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 viewed her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a timely, 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 if Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a location in the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of lots of and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details with the nib as well as the blotch was a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus much more dabs before entire blotter converted into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another location; she paused just long enough 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 being a chocolate web.

It absolutely was a young type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite notice that.
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