You can find moments within our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna noisy . grades, a basic girl who, if she remained alive, won’t know how even during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken some other turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in college. 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 right into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you really wanted to save time, selecting far wiser to try out the tortoise.

But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali if we remained stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she may find anything passionate than Japanese prints.

I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God knowning that the writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the way you control some of it.” There is much else that must be controlled too, according to 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 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 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 a time, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it turned out the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area on the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of lots of 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 on the absorbent paper plus more dabs before the entire blotter turned into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From 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 one corner to another location; she paused just long enough to thicken the guts stretch without breaking the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat on her desk like a chocolate web.

It turned out an early sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite see that.
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