You will find moments within our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, a nice girl who, if she remained alive, doesn’t discover how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

We have often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters at school. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in a mud-bath. It took us months to learn the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save lots of time, choosing far wiser to try out the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali once we remained stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find anything passionate than Japanese prints.

From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God understanding that the real writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon how we control a lot of it.” There is anything more that would have to 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 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 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 time, it seemed as if Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it turned out the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location on top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details with all the nib as well as the blotch had been a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus much more dabs until 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 corner to the next; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the center stretch having to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat to be with her desk as being a chocolate web.

It was an early on sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite see that.
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