You will find moments within our past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, will not know how even during grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.

I have often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the aid of ink blotters in class. 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 understand the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to play the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a way to Bali when we were stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she could find anything passionate than Japanese prints.

I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God and that the writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon the method that you 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 with 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 as if Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a location at the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the area and watched the darkness grow; a few details using the nib along with the blotch had been a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus much more dabs before entire blotter turned into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Away 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 derived from one of corner to another location; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the middle stretch acquiring to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat for my child desk as being a chocolate web.

It had been a young type of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
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