Inkblot Paper

My father one day brought home  for me a heavy stack of what looked like rectangular note pads. He was all excited about it, and I was curious what it was he was holding. He said it was for my white writing desk and went upstairs with me, so I could put the stack in one of my desk drawers. He explained it was inkblot paper, but it struck me as more than that. These had a thick paper cover on them, with pictures and sayings each from all over the world. The pictures were beautiful and very well done, colored ink drawings at that , although they did not identify the artists. There were sayings from Russia, India, Hawaii, the Near East, Africa, Spain, Mexico. Looking at the pictures made me want to travel, know the people who were often dancing a native dance in the pictures. One saying , that to this day, stuck in my mind, was a saying from Hawaii. All the words on the ink blot papers' fronts were in Flemish, black words on white paper, and this saying from Hawaii, against the back ground of pretty Hula women, read: "Mooie vrouwen, vuile listen." That means: " Pretty women, ugly tricks." To read this at age 12, had an unsettling impact. My mother was said to be beautiful, and I already had some misgivings about her behaviour and methods, and I have often thought back on that particular ink blot paper and its seductive drawings of cavorting Hawaiian girls in grass skirts and my mother's disastrous handling of her marriage and her daughters. I treated my collection of illustrated ink blot papers like a treasure. When I left for the US in 1976, they were still in my desk's left bottom drawer. Whatever happened to it, I wonder, I wish now I had taken it with me, because as much as I moved in the years since 1976, up until the year I married in 1986, I was able to hang onto the few treasured child hood mementos I carried from place to place. My father had a real interest in philosophy and morality. It is really sad to think that, in the end he was not able to see through my mother's intentions with him, or to save himself in spite of his intelligence and keen insight. The collection of ink blot paper was a treasure to me, because of its exotic quality and because for many years it was something to hold onto, as my father became more and more emotionally distant from me. The desk and the ink blot paper were my inheritance, emotionally speaking, that my father was capable of love, when it came to his oldest daughter, he just was not very interested in pursuing it, or keeping it alive. In the end, both the desk and the collection of exotic ink blot paper were lost, and after my father lost his mind to dementia, all memory of me was erased. Like ink blot paper, that absorbs extra fountain pen ink, my memory retains him, and like the ink that is gone, the imprint on the paper still holds traces of the words and their meaning. Perhaps, in the end , that was all that his mind had left to him, impressions whose origin he no longer could trace.