Yesterday I drove past a billboard advertising back to
school supplies and gave an involuntary shudder. For the life of me I couldn’t
figure out what it was that elicited this reaction. Then I remembered, perhaps
the most traumatising moment of my childhood, when my mum let my dad help me
with the all-important task of covering my schoolbooks…
Do you remember contacting your books in school? It was
always such a difficult job; I never knew why they didn’t just make the covers
of exercise books sturdier. It was such a time consuming ritual; cutting the
contact, fitting it to the size of the book and then trying to coax tiny
bubbles out of plastic with a ruler, a job which is surely intended for someone
with three or four hands. The worst part was that the mistakes you made would
haunt you for the rest of the year, as you would try (in vain) to scrape away
any air-bubbly evidence of your crappy contacting abilities. Anyway, my phobia
of school book contact came to a head the year that I was eight.
My mum was busy doing something and sent my dad with me to
K-mart to purchase the annual contact supplies. If your dad is anything like my
dad you’ll know that dads, no matter how deft at using a nail gun or doing
differential calculus, sometimes fail at very simple tasks.
So I find myself in Kmart with my father trying to decide on
some contact. My dad, obviously bored with this mundane task that means nothing
to him, tells me I have taken too long, grabs three rolls of contact and takes
them to checkout. It is only once we are home that I realised with absolute
dismay that my dad has bought me the worst contact known to man. As I unroll
the contact it becomes apparent that this is not the butterflies floating on a
purple background that I wanted, but rather shirtless and semi-shirtless men –
although to be fair the background was purple. This contact boasted hundreds of
men with washboard abs, some wearing open vests, seemingly caught mid-nineties
style sexy stripper dance.
School started the next day so my mum decided this
would have to do and covered ALL of my books in sexed up, Peter Andre
look-alikes. Need I remind you that I was eight years old and nowhere near an
acceptable age to be ogling semi-naked men? I don’t know what my mum was
thinking, but I guess money and time factored in there somewhere. So I did what
any self-respecting eight year old would do and slowly lost every last one of
those god-forsaken, crotch-covered books and made my mum go out and buy the
butterfly paper.
But it still haunts me, seventeen years later.
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