MAY 3 - SUNDAY

 

I remember in high school I had a teacher called Mrs Pea (we gave her the name because she mostly wore green). She was one of my parents' friends but I didn’t know at the time.

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One day we had to do what she called ”creative writing“ and, to make it more fun, we could do it anonymously, typing it up and posting it into a box she used to keep on her desk for messages. I took full advantage of the situation and wrote a whole lot of stuff about a fight I’d had the night before with my girlfriend (not existent at time). I wrote I was pretty upset about it and I must have said something awful in it. I think I called my girlfriend a selfish bitch and vaguely referred to the cause of our fight by saying she accused me of not being enough of a man for her. Mrs. Pea couldn’t know who had written that page, obviously. However, when reading it to us, I had the distinct impression she knew I was the author. I did my best not to blush, not sure I truly managed. Anyway, she was so angry and disappointed that went off saying that we were wasting our time watching stuff that will eventually kill our, as she called it, “creative approach to life”. It was pretty bad because she kept banging on it for ages, completely ignoring what my mates had written.

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At the end of her class I felt that I had to do something, mostly because she had threatened us with another assignment to do over the weekend. I was determined not to make it happen. So, at the break, I asked her if I could have a word and told her she had just read the product of my own creativity. Mrs Pea froze and said I shouldn’t have disclosed my identity. She then managed to say that being creative doesn’t mean lying and that I was lucky because she had no intention to report me. The stupid I was back then I dared to point out that being creative means precisely using imagination and that I felt I had done just that. Her reply was another assignment just for me to do for the following Monday. My schoolmates were spared.

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This all came back to me today at lunch at my parents'. They gave me the news that Mrs Pea had passed away, apparently she hadn’t been well for a while and her death was kind of expected. So we ended up talking about her and I found out they knew about my brush with her very own idea of being creative. The weekend I had to write her assignment on fact and fiction apparently she got in touch with them to say she feared she had made a mistake and offered to drop by to have a chat with me. But my parents felt that spending a weekend doing my homework couldn’t do me any wrong, and promised they would pass on to me her apologies. Which they didn’t.

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I am here writing about this because I can’t make any sense of it at all, apart from the fact that if Mrs Pea had apologised back then or simply said that maybe she had made a mistake, I wouldn’t have credited to her my love for writing.