#83. Three Assemblies in One Day (Wednesday, June 21, 2000)

What was your best day…of doing a ton of exciting stuff that only a kid would find exciting?

From the time I was a young child until I became a crotchety old college student, I used to love rainy days – the stormier the better. I associated bad weather with chaos and lots of interesting things happening at once. As ludicrous as this sounds, nine-year-old me did have a perfect example to support that notion.

It was the third last day of fourth grade, and I remember the rain that Wednesday morning being particularly heavy.¹

In the morning, we had this big assembly to hand out end-of-year awards for each class. And not those cheesy achievement awards they give out monthly until everybody gets one. We already got those². No, these were three legit medals: for academic achievement, for improvement during the year, and for being a model student. All I know was, I didn’t get one—and I really wanted one. Looking back, that may have been a big motivation for me to actually start trying in school. That said, I did win this fourth (smaller) French award at the end, despite having done absolutely nothing in that class.

Then in the afternoon we had a second assembly. This one was to honor my school (Mutchmor) being recognized as the oldest in Ottawa. I’m not sure why they decided to have a celebration then, unless it was triggered by some even older school closing down. Which seems like a pretty sadistic reason, but awesome if true.

All I recall is they had this dude in 17th-century dress-up standing at the front dramatically recounting the full hundred-plus year history of Mutchmor from this scroll. Also, they had TV cameras there. And I had never been on TV before³. So whenever the camera panned across the audience, Chris McCormick⁴ and I (and a bunch of other kids) stood up and waved our arms around, which pissed off the sixth-graders behind us quite a bit.

Finally, we had a recorder concert for the parents that evening, so we had to hang around until six. Which was pretty cool…well, except for the part where I started tearing up when one of the kids, Wesley, wouldn’t let me see his Magic cards. (Probably because the day before I cried so much after he insulted my playing that he had to go home early with a headache. Yeah, I was kind of a baby.)

That worried me a lot, because if my mom found out, I’d be in big trouble. And throughout the concert, while Wesley and Neil kept teasing me about my mom seeing that I cried⁵, my mom in the audience kept pointing to her face and I was sure I was screwed.

But it turned out just had something on my face I hadn’t wiped off. Even better, she was with one of her family friends, Mrs. Guo (#117), whose kids Rebecca and Clark were also at my school doing the recorder thing, and we all went to the Pizza Hut buffet for dinner.

My parents never did find out, one of the few times I can say that.

To make things even better, we also got our report cards back that day.

And after doing so bad with homework completion the previous term that I had to be called in to the parent-teacher interview (specifically because I had thrown my mom under the bus, by telling the teacher I wasn’t doing homework because my mom was making me do extra study at home—which she only did because I was acting like I had no homework), I opened mine that night, in full view of my parents, to see an A- average.

That was probably the most total relief—and the most total chaos—I’ve ever felt in a single day.

Specifically, I remember Chris doing his Jar Jar Binks imitation, going “mesa like playing in the rain” when we met in the schoolyard, then him going “mesa don’t like heavy rain, only small rain” ten minutes later while we all rushed inside.
Including a recent assembly where literally everybody in the class got one. Though our teacher seriously contemplated not giving it to the kid who loudly said “You’re not welcome” to her as he was holding the door for her on our way inside the gym.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Two weeks before, as I was on the minivan home, a large crowd of high school students stops us while shouting in a panic. Turns out this girl got smashed in the head with a rock (during a fight with another girl, who had since run away) and she was bleeding critically and needed us to call 9-1-1. I didn’t see any of this—from the moment I heard the word “bleeding” I stuck my face in the seat and didn’t dare lift it, but instead got the full play-by-play of the paramedics from my own van-mates. The next day, I turned off Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals after the first overtime and ran upstairs (missing Jason Arnott’s Cup-winning goal), because the local news had come on and I was sure this would be the lead story.
My best friend for the last few months of the school year, after Harry moved away to San Francisco (#88).
So much so that they were eventually called away by the teacher and didn’t return.