Exercise Book - July 20 2026

 

Exercise Book

July 20 2026



When I pawed through the archive

of my ephemera from school

I unearthed some rumpled scribblers

from the cluttered box,

3-ring folders

of lined foolscap

in softly creased covers.

Exercise Book 

was printed in official looking letters

on each of them.

What they contained

 — bad poetry

pretentious essays

and math that didn’t add up,

chemical formulae

that could have turned water into wine

for all I now know —

struck me less than the name.

Exercise,

as if school work

was like working out

 — repetitive,

generating sweat,

building mental muscle.

I remember being exercised

all through school.

The hormonal angst

of bad skin and hair days

unattainable girls.

Of the high marks

I was sure I needed

to earn my parents’ love.

Of failing to make the team,

or barely making it

and blowing the big play.

Adolescence

exercises everything

a young person can muster.

Who knows why I kept this stuff.

My future biographer?

Because it was timeless, masterful, one-of-a-kind?

Or because the young

are the centre of the world,

solipsists

preoccupied with their own small dramas

and shaky certainties.

Who despite feeling invisible

as well as powerless 

also feel spotlit

and unsparingly judged.

But to throw it all out

seems like renouncing myself;

who I was,

the path to what I’ve become,

my insecurities and struggles

and the minor triumphs

that meant that much more.

Not that it won’t all be tossed

the moment I’m gone.

Not even worthy

of the Goodwill or Sally Ann,

it will be left at the curb

with that week’s garbage

to be carted off;

no ceremony

no guest list.

Because you can only hang on

to your one precious life

for so long

before you’re consigned to forgetfulness. 

And even if it isn’t junked

  — left mouldering

in the corner of the basement

where it sat all those years

waiting to be disinterred —

mould will get it,

water seep in,

the ink fade

eventually.

Yet we hang on regardless

hoping for posterity.

And if hope is never false

who knows?

Even the stuff you laugh at

to cover your embarrassment,

the stuff you’d rather forget

but hate to dishonour.

And anyway, can’t,

because the past is always present 

box or not.

This feature in this weekend’s Globe and Mail by Ian Brown inspired this poem. Although we’re of the same vintage, and a cover like this — according to the illustration accompanying his piece — emerged from his trunk, mine were always Hilroy brand. I guess private schools had fancier supplies!

The name immediately struck me: Exercise Book.  I never used that term. Nor Scribbler, for that matter. (Mostly, I used loose leaf paper and Duo-Tangs. Not even the tried and true Hilroys.)

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/282265262198209

I’m not sentimental. And I’m a nihilist when it comes to there being any point in saving things. So while my mother squirrelled away some stuff (there wasn’t a lot of it) and passed it on, I haven’t kept any. But if I had, I’m sure I would have been as disillusioned as Mr. Brown about my juvenile conceit of being a writer; or at least becoming one.