This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

When I was a child, our family bought a coconut from the grocery store. It was a rare and exotic novelty.

We all gathered to try and access the strange and nourishing coconut milk trapped inside the huge hairy stone.

In a time before YouTube, we had to resort to our own ingenuity to open the coconut. We moved the operation out into our garage where we tried a hammer and nails. We tried a drill and screwdriver.

Eventually, we smashed the coconut open and watched as a tiny splash of coconut milk trickled out onto the dirty garage floor.

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I was a pretty good student in high school. I wasn’t great at applying myself, but I was capable of getting marks in the 80s and 90s. At the time I thought I was smart. I found out a couple of years later that my ease with math and physics was actually an ease with high-school-level math and physics. When later confronted with university-level material, I quickly realized that I needed to work hard and didn’t know how.

While I did well enough academically in high school, my attendance record was weak. Contingent on transportation of some kind, I skipped a lot of classes. Teachers didn’t press too hard on this, given how I was keeping up with the class.

I had one grade-12 science teacher who got suspicious. I skipped his class one afternoon. The next day as I entered his class, he asked me where I had been the day before. I steeled myself and lied. I told him I had been sick at home.

He had laid a trap for me. Before class, he had phoned my parents to confirm my absence for the day before. He knew I wasn’t home sick — he was asking to see how I would respond.

He looked me in the eye and earnestly asked: Why did you lie to me?

One of a handful of students who witnessed this train-wreck later told me that I actually “made a sound”. It might have been my soul leaving my body.

I don’t even know how I responded, but it felt like a punch in the gut made out of shame and regret. Skipping a class wasn’t a big deal, but an adult human being looking you in the eye and sincerely asking you why you lied to them — that left a mark.

I remember thinking: you’re a high-school teacher and I’m a student — aren’t I supposed to lie to you?

Even though that moment has stuck with me for about 25 years, it didn’t do much to change my behaviour. A few weeks later, I had a friend call the school office and have me paged for a “dentist appointment”.

The PA-system in our class passed on the message. I packed up my things and walked across the front of the class to the door. I’m not sure what the teacher was thinking, but every kid in that class knew exactly what was happening. I knew they knew, and they knew I knew. For about twenty seconds, I was Ferris Bueller.

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

As a toddler, I had access to loads of great books. We had Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, Berenstein [sic] Bears. While I enjoyed most of these, there was one that I remembered dreading.

Hands Hands Fingers Thumb by Al Perkins was a simple rhyming book about monkeys and their drums. Eric Gurney’s illustrations of those monkeys, though, terrified me. The growing refrain and rhythm of the book would build the terror:

“One thumb, one thumb, drumming on a drum…”
“One by one more monkeys come…”

Until eventually, there were:

Millions of monkeys
Millions of drums
MILLIONS OF MONKEYS, DRUM DRUMMING ON DRUMS.

It was just too many monkeys.

As an adult, I was looking through the “baby book” that my parents had lovingly kept for me. It contained the snip of hair from my first haircut, among other mementos and milestones.

I came across the “Steven’s favourite book:” page in the baby book. The horrifying answer: Hands Hands Fingers Thumb.

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I don’t recall how old I was at the time, but let’s be generous and assume I was only about 8 years old. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was on Prince Edward Island as part of a celebrity charity golf tournament.

I wasn’t a big sports fan, but I understood that Wayne Gretzky was a big deal. My parents took me and a few of my siblings to see if we could spy his greatness from the fringes of the golf course. We skated to where the puck was going and intercepted Gretzky from the side of the road by the Belvedere Golf Course.

We not only saw him — he was graciously and kindly signing autographs. My siblings and I each got a scrap of paper signed by The Great One, Wayne Gretzky.

On the drive home, I noticed that his pen hadn’t been working well. You could read his signature, but it was pretty light on the page. So, I fixed it. I traced over it and darkened it up.

As I was doing this, my family noticed, and it was only from their reaction that I understood that tracing over an autograph effectively destroyed it.

I’m not sure I really cared that I had a Wayne Gretzky autograph. However, knowing that I had casually destroyed something of value was enough to break my tiny heart.

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

Our first family computer was a Packard Bell 20Mhz 486sx, with 2MB of RAM and a 100MB hard drive. It was amazing. It came with Windows 3.1, which I soon discovered was quite limited.

Family friends had Macs, which were remarkably advanced from a user-interface standpoint compared to our simple Windows 3.1 Program Manager UI. I had seen a piece of software called Central Point Desktop advertised that promised to bring the power of the Mac GUI (and more) to the humble Windows 3.1 user.

It was $99. As with my telescope in the 4th grade, I somehow acquired the funds to make the purchase.

When it finally arrived, I was so excited. My desktops (yeah, that’s right, multiple desktops) would be so organized.

When I tried to install it, I was devastated. It turned out that it needed 4MB of RAM. I only had 2MB.

I recall a local computer shop selling us 4MB of additional RAM for $400. One hundred dollars per megabyte of memory.. I can’t imagine how I justified this expense to my parents at the time. I must have been really disappointed about that first $99.

In the end, I did get Central Point Desktop installed. It was okay. I was okay.

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

The first such tale is about desire, hope, and value.

I was in the fourth-grade and had spied an object of desire in the Consumer’s Distributing catalogue (source of several such tragic desires). It was a telescope that cost $39.

As I recall, I saved up my money for months, but given the limited income streams of a ten-year-old, I can only assume the money came in one form or another from my parents. That they let me think I was saving up my own money is a prime example of how good things were for me.

In the time it took to “save my money”, my expectations of the performance of the telescope grew. By the time I actually got the telescope, I had Hubble-like expectations. I would be able to see the U.S. flag on the moon and rings of Saturn. I would be discovering habitable extra-solar planets and putting Einstein’s theories to the test.

The time finally came to buy the telescope. I can still picture it. About two inches in diameter, about a foot-and-a-half long, it stood on a small plastic tripod stand.

We set it up on the window-sill in our family room and pointed it towards an enormous, bright, full moon.

It sucked.

It was easier to see the moon with the naked eye than through this piece of junk. We thought maybe it was broken, but the more we used it, the more it became clear that what had seemed like a NASA-sized budget to a fourth-grader just wasn’t enough to buy a worthwhile stargazing device.

I had squandered my limited childhood financial resources on a worthless device. The lesson I can see in retrospect was one of dangerous expectations. The longer and more deeply you want something, the less likely it will be able to meet your ballooning expectations. As you’ll see later in this tragic series, this was not a lesson I learned at the time.

When you’re blessed, as I was, with a healthy, pleasant, and generally good childhood, you really have to look hard to find heartbreak. When all you’ve known is stability and pleasantness, though, little problems can seem like big disasters. Such is the delight and tragedy of childhood that you can be in a divine delight over a toy or a hug in one minute, and in the depths of despair over a lost marble in the next.

When you’re a child, your heart is easily delighted and just as easily broken.

I find something strangely compelling about the little things that seem like great wrongs as a child. So, I give you a series of such tales: Trivial Tragedies, a series of insignificant heartbreaks. I’ll keep a running list of the stories here as I publish them:

• Trivial Tragedy #1: The Telescope
• Trivial Tragedy #2: Minimum System Requirements
• Trivial Tragedy #3: The Great One’s Autograph
• Trivial Tragedy #4: Hands Hands Fingers Thumb
• Trivial Tragedy #5: Man-e-faces
• Trivial Tragedy #6: The case of the broken case
• Trivial Tragedy #7: The science class lie
• Trivial Tragedy #8: The coconut