The ink came in an opaque plastic bottle, the size of an adult fist, and difficult to pop open which made one think the lid would hold similarly tight when screwed back on. One was wrong about that. Ink was a possession that marked a very clear line between little kids and school. For the basic kindergarten penmanship exercises — the squiggles and circles that were not really expected to coalesce into letters — ink was provided; it was there, in the pen, when it was time to practice. In first grade, ink and the filling of one’s fountain pen became one’s own responsibility. Only fountain pens were approved for use in elementary school, ostensibly because writing with a fountain pen established proper penmanship and the ink was deemed to be a proper color to minimize eye strain.

The ink was purple, a deep, almost black, but undeniably different color. One could have all the ball-point pens one wanted at home–black, blue, green, even the sacred teacherly red, but in the hierarchy of penmanship ink was king, and only ink had the royal purple. 

Ink challenged one’s minor motor skills: one had to dip the pen into the bottle, screw the plunger in one direction to push out the air (and make pleasant little bubbles on the oil surface of the sacred liquid), then screw the plunger in the opposite direction, and then pull out the pen and wipe it clean. One’s fingers inevitably grazed the rim of the bottle and got stained, purple half-moons that seeped into the skin and revealed its minute dactyloscopic landscapes. The ink was very difficult to get off one’s fingers.

I never doubted the ink. I was not, ever, one of those kids who’d raise their hand in the middle of a dictation exercise to announce they ran out–an aberration that had to be corrected on the spot by having the negligent come up to the teacher’s desk and refill his (almost always his) pen from the bottle kept there under the hawkish glare of the teacher who was not only interrupted in the zen of dictating a passage about birch-trees to the momentarily quiet hive of forty second-graders but also least desired ink splatter all over her desk.  The teachers also were required to use ink–and only ink–to record our grades.

All the ink was the same color and came from the same factory. It was labeled Rainbow-2, which made you seriously wonder what happened to Rainbow-1 and also ponder the irony of naming the substance whose explicit job it was to be a uniform color across the sixth of the Earth’s landmass “rainbow.” I can vaguely recall the taste of it, although for the life of me I can’t reconstruct the circumstances under which it would end up in my mouth, other than trying to suck a particularly generous stain off my fingers. People drank it though, for its reputed alcohol content, commonly enough that “Go drink some ink!” was a derogatory send-off to someone who regularly appeared disconnected from our shared elementary-school reality.

I never questioned the ink. My mother, who went to the same school and received penmanship training before the arrival of pens, viewed my struggle to keep my fingers clean benevolently because they were still easier than her experiences with quills and inkpots (she was born in 1950; if you don’t believe me that Soviet schools had inkpots in 1957, ask her yourself).  She–an architect–operated with the immeasurably more exalted substance of black India ink. This was kept in a much smaller vial, of delicately tinted blue glass, usually with her drafting instruments, and I was absolutely forbidden to touch it. Good drafting ink was hard to find and much more resilient to soap that even our bête noir Rainbow-2.  Only under the auspices of my artistic education would Mom let me use the dangerously sharp steel nib she had among her tools to dip carefully into the precious black and try out on a bit of her drafting paper to experience what it was like. In comparison with my fountain pen, using her nib was like, to borrow a metaphor from my later experiences, getting on a dressage horse after riding on a ranch. It was the new frontier.

Pens, therefore, were central possessions. An uncle whose family lived in a remote city in Russia and therefore rarely visited brought me a very fine, lightweight gold-nibbed Chinese instrument when I must have been twelve or thirteen. I had it for twenty years–until it just disintegrated from age. I had to wait another ten years for my next favorite pen: given to me as a part of a representational set by the mayor of Alytus, a small city in Lithuania, when I visited as part of my duties as the U.S. cultural attaché.  I loved that pen and was crestfallen when I lost it about a year later.

We were in fifth or sixth grade when the hegemony of the purple ink shattered. In my memory, most certainly unreliable, it is the math class where I sat behind the two most popular girls in class — both young gymnasts, worldly, beautiful, and allowed to access the material miracles of the world largely still beyond the imagination of us simple 1986-vintage mortals. The girls were both named Anya, and had a complicated relationship that mixed solidarity and rivalry in equal measures. They had the most beautifully kept notebooks in our class, and every girl, especially the overgrown, nerdy klutz that was I, aspired to be like them. On that cold (a lot of school happened in winter), dark morning in math class an Anya pulled out her fountain pen and, as we all did every morning, wrote out the date in her notebook. The ink was blue. The revolution had begun.

– Nina Murray