The other day I was tidying up some of Hailey’s old school supplies in our basement “craft room” – and by “tidying up”, I mean my savagely throwing handfuls of shit into the air and kicking over the piles of crap strewn around the room in a full on blind tantrum of Godzilla-like proportions because I can’t find my cycling socks) – anyway, I was reminded of the “Great Pencil Crayon War of 1988” when I also happened across a discarded and forgotten ‘Poppy Red’ pencil crayon lying on the floor under the desk.
Because of course it was.
So what is this great conflict of which I speak?
Why, the “Great Pencil Crayon War of 1988” was an epic battle that occurred back in high school between my mother and Mr. Thompson, the rather egregious teacher who was unfortunate enough to a) have me as part of his Grade 10 Geography class, and b) have crossed swords with my mother.
I know, Hollywood isn’t knocking down my door anytime soon.
But I digress, these are just the things that come to my mind when I’m throwing tantrums, err “tidying up”.
What else can I say?
Anyway, it just happens that this same ‘Poppy Red’ pencil crayon that I discovered under the desk the other was of the popular Laurentian type and brand that most kids will carry with them to school in their knapsacks.
You know, these things:
As it happened, I also happened to use these back in my own school days. They came in clear plastic packages folded over with “24 brilliant colours” tucked away neatly inside, and to accept any other brand of pencil crayon was simply laughable. To put it bluntly, they were the Mack Daddy of pencil crayons back in the day and I guess they still are.*
In early public school, the art supplies were more or less handed to you; all the crayons, paint, and glue you could ever hope to eat and/or use. But during the junior school years, art supplies such as pencil crayons became more the burden of the parent to provide as “essential requirements” for school, and this bothered my mother – a former teacher herself – to no end. (Don’t even get me started on her views on having to purchase us ordinary writing paper.) And when it came to pencil crayons specifically, Laurentian were the total bomb-diggity.
In fact, so highly regarded was this particular brand of pencil crayons that they were listed by name in the pre-class syllabus handed out for my Grade 9 Geography class the year before, which I also had with Mr. Thompson, so I was no stranger to Mr. Thompson’s complete hard on for Laurentian pencil crayons.
Not by a long shot.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
Prior to beginning my Grade 9 Geography class with Mr. Thompson, I begged my mother for the necessary required equipment in which to please him but my mother would have none of it believing instead that any brand of pencil crayon was good as any other. (She’s not wrong) Unfortunately for me, she also believed that the cheapest brand of pencil crayon procured from the local Bi-Way store at the mall was as good as the coveted Laurentian’s you could buy at any of the other big box stores where everyone else shopped. And given that we could never afford any of the popular brands of clothes that were fashionable at time anyway, just being to show up with the proper essentials just once for class seemed like a much bigger deal at the time than it really was. My mom stubbornly refused however, so I ended up sneakily asking my grandmother instead and, low and behold, I showed up to my first day of class with a newly acquired package of the required 24 fancy-ass Laurentian pencil crayons.
Big whoop.
I am not proud.
At the time though, I considered myself very clever – especially when Mr. Thompson handed out his first assignment a mere few minutes into the class. It was a blank map of Canada with very specific directions: 1) colour in the map with one colour only, and 2) that colour had to be ‘Poppy Red’. Also, there was only a ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ mark to be given on your abilities to carry the above task. And with that, Mr. Thompson leaned back and kicked his feet up on the desk and went to work on making short work of a beach volleyball magazine.
Now why Mr. Thompson so preferred ‘Poppy Red’ over, say, ‘Cherry Red’ or ‘Candy Red’ I have no fucking idea, but thankfully I had come to class prepared and for two days I coloured my ass off. And for the record, easy as it might seem, this assignment ended up being more like some sort of crazy Medieval ordeal in having to endure colouring your map “crispy and distinctly” until your fingers were sore and blistered, and your pencil crayon had been worn down to a mere stump. It sucked. It was agony and my knuckles still get inflamed every time see ‘Poppy Red’ to this day …
Shit, I can hardly leave the house come Remembrance Day.
Looking back on it, I think Mr. Thompson knew exactly what kind of cruel punishment we was inflicting on us with this assignment. I mean seriously, what did we as budding and impressionable 14-year-old’s learn from that particular assignment other than colouring sucks and that Mr. Thompson himself had some weird obsessive-compulsive fetish involving ‘Poppy Red’?
I know this because we never touched those fucking pencil crayons for the rest of the fucking year.
SWEAR TO GOD!
Now had my mother known any of this, of course, she would have lost her shit completely – particularly on me for having gone behind her back in the first place and conning my grandmother into the forbidden fruit. Fortunately though, when I was enrolled in Mr. Thompson’s Grade 10 Geography class the following year I was already prepared with my “essential requirements” having that same package of 24 Laurentian’s; minus the ‘Poppy Red’ mind you, which had been reduced to the size of a cigarette butt after the previous years’ torture, err assignment.
I was confident that this would be more than adequate for another school year, if not the rest of high school. Surely the colouring was behind us anyway. But once again, Mr. Thompson handed out his first assignment to his new sophomore class: a map of Canada … to be coloured in with only one colour … that only colour being ‘Poppy Red’ … only a ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ to be issued afterwards.
Are you fucking shitting me?
My hand shot up immediately:
“Umm, didn’t we do this map last year sir?”
I think my voice may even have warbled a little bit with the sudden panic that consumed my brain that I was about to be publicly exposed as a nefarious pencil crayon recycler …
Mr. Thompson just looked at me from the front of the room with his dark, lifeless, uncaring eyes and replied:
“I am aware, Mr. Nash. However, I feel that this is also an appropriate introduction for this years robust curricula as well.”
Now, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he meant by a “robust curricula” way back then, but I sure know bullshit when someone hands it to me so I responded by holding up my sad, pathetic stub of a ‘Poppy Red’ pencil crayon for him to see. I probably gave him a snarky look too that said something like: “… like this ‘Poppy Red’, sir?”
Obviously, this did not endear myself to him and to which he added:
“Perhaps Mr. Nash, had you spent your summer working or collecting cans or something, you might have been able to purchase yourself another pack of Laurentian’s. Didn’t you see them on the list of ‘essentials’? Let this be a lesson in preparedness.”
“Preparedness”?
The fucker.
Prepare this …
Of course, this got snickers from my all classmates and I felt exposed as that “poor kid from the other side of the tracks”, which essentially I was. And as a matter of public record, I had worked through that entire summer but was handing over most of it to my mother for upkeep on the house, groceries, and what have you. We weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but every dollar mattered in our house and a second package of pencil crayon’s solely for one colour to satisfy some power-tripping dipshit’s OCD tendencies was not considered “essential”. Sure I may have fallen for it the previous year, but even I knew this time around that this was wrong – time to bring in the Big Guns, and by that I mean my mother.
In short, I scrounged up a ‘Cherry Red’ from somewhere (a back alley pencil crayon Black Market of sorts, I don’t know), handed in my assignment – itself a rather ‘uncrisp and indistinct’ effort I might add – and promptly received my failing grade. And as easy as that, my trap had been set and my plan for revenge was set in motion. You see, in a few short weeks there would be the “Parent-Teacher Night” which, of course, provides the opportunity for parents to meet with their kids teachers and discuss their progress. And as a minor note, my mother already thought that Mr. Thompson was (and I quote): “a prick”. I have absolutely no idea what transpired during Grade 9’s “Parent-Teacher Night” but there was definitely no love lost between my mother and Mr. Thompson, and now this year he would have to explain his particular lesson plan and resulting mark with my mother – the ex-school teacher, thrift mom extraordinaire, and social justice champion.**
The battle lines for the “Great Pencil Crayon War of 1988” had been drawn and Thompson was fucked for sure!
To me, this confrontation was going to be on par with other famous rematches as, say, Ali vs. Frazier, the infamous Super Fight II at Madison Square Garden in 1974, or perhaps the Undertaker vs. Kane at Wrestlemania 20 … but alas, once again, I would not be privy to see any of it.
Having said that, in the days leading up to “Parent-Teacher Night” I sure made sure my mother was cocked and primed with both barrels loaded. She left that evening by herself with my failed ‘Cherry Red’ map in her purse, my father wisely opting to stay home to watch the hockey game – perhaps already sensing what was going to go down.
She was seething.
It was bound to be epic, and shortly after she left I went out into the front yard to sit and wait for the mushroom cloud that would inevitably appear on the horizon once she had begun to lay into ‘ol Thompson.
It was going to be absolute carnage.
My mother returned about an hour and a half later and once she had taken her shoes off, she pulled out my map of Canada which had now been re-emblazoned with a new passing grade and put it wordlessly on the kitchen table. I wasn’t surprised of course, but wanting more details I asked her what had happened.
She just looked at me and just said quite matter-of-factually: “you won’t be in any of his classes anymore”.
Inside, I did this:
Fuck Thompson and his maps.
I never did have Mr. Thompson for any other classes for the rest of my time at high school. In fact, we may never have even spoken another word to one another again after that, which seeing as how small my high school was, would have been no small feat believe me.
However, before she went outside again to water her garden, she added for good measure: “Oh, and he’s still a prick”.
Game. Set. Match … douchebag.
God help me.
*Except maybe when it’s lodged in your neck after ricocheting off the wall where it was initially thrown in a blind fit of rage, but again I digress …
**Of course, this also meant that I had to come clean about where I had obtained my original set of Laurentian pencil crayons and suffer my own consequences, which included paying back my grandmother the whopping $8.99 they had initially cost her.
God Help Me! 