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

We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in college. Kids 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 into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted in order to save time, selecting far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali if we were stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she might 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 action of God and that the real writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how we control the ink.” There was anything else that would have to be controlled at the same time, in accordance with 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, thin line 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 quite a while, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place on the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the location and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib and also the blotch was a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and more dabs until the entire blotter turned into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat to be with her desk just like a chocolate web.

It was an early version of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made flowing hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite note that.
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