You can find moments within our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna in the early grades, a nice girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t understand how during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. You will find there’s lesson here links in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.

We have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken a different 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 the difficult 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 find out the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted in order to save time, you’d be far wiser to play the tortoise.

But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali whenever we remained as stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when individuals 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 act of God understanding that the real writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the way you control the ink.” There is much else that must be controlled at the same time, according to 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 hard 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 a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place on top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib along with the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper and more dabs prior to the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to a higher; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the guts stretch acquiring to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat on her desk as being a chocolate web.

It was an earlier form of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made your hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite see that.
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