Toilet Paper with Class

I’ve been away for quite a while, mostly for good reasons, which may be a future blog post. I missed you all terribly, but I know you went on with your lives as best you could without me. When I finally sat down to write a blog, I discovered a 3/4 written draft in my notebook from the spring that I had forgotten. Praise Jesus! That saves both of us from me writing a half-assed blog at the 11th hour. You’re welcome.

I often walk through Beacon Hill in Boston. It’s a well-heeled place of old and new money that is a tourist’s delight. If I’m in a pissy mood, I can roll my eyes at the people who live there as they saunter their way down the narrow brick sidewalk, past the beautiful gaslit streetlamps and hand carved signs of the boutiques, clutching their artesian coffee in one hand and the leash of a ribbon-festooned, over-coiffured pure breed in the other.

On this particular day, however, I was appreciating the 200-plus-year-old architecture, the window boxes of daffodils and pansies, and tasteful store window designs that change with the seasons.

The independent store owners make an effort here.

Everything was neat and tidy, until I came across something astonishing: a short piece of toilet paper strewn along a black wrought iron fence. Then 3 doors down, a swirl of TP rested on a small boxwood shrub. I was in walking-to-work mode, so it took 2 more instances of TP sightings before it truly registered.

Someone had toilet papered tony Beacon Hill.

The final one I saw was pictured below, and I had to laugh. Even when enduring a practical joke, Beacon Hill is still elegant and classy. Note the length and drape of the TP on the meter. Just add a 6 foot tall, size 0 model and you have an edgy advertisement for a Burberry silk scarf. Even in toilet papering shenanigans, the jokester followed the neighborhood rules of decorum and historical preservation. Coincidentally, I had just been telling a friend about my one and only high school toilet paper expedition. I didn’t know it was even still a thing, so it warmed my crabby, middle-aged heart to see it in Beacon Hill no less.

My high school friends and I were the academic top of our school, aka nerds, although they also were athletes, so they had some balance. I was just a full on nerd. Junior year we had an English class with the worst teacher in the school. We read 2, maybe 3 books that year. Being nerds, we were distraught. We were used to reading 10 books, getting A’s, reaping the benefits of being rule followers, and basking in our teachers’ admiration. Oh, but Miss Satta. Indeterminately middle-aged, owner of 3 polyester dresses, body like a barrel with sticks for legs, clawlike hands and nails, and partial to using the name Roscoe when writing an example sentence. She didn’t seem to like us or her job and put forth minimum effort. When she returned our writing assignments, we might get a, *gasp* B- or on several occasions, a seizure-inducing C+, no comments. This simply wasn’t done. Not to us and not without a good reason. Fueled by distress, we approached her forbidding desk and asked why. She’d look the paper over for 5 seconds, then cross out the grade and write B+ or A-. No explanation, no apology. Just a dark look that sent us scurrying back to our seat.

The height of our suffering came from a paper we wrote for one of the few books we did read, The Scarlet Letter. The assignment about the daughter became known as the “Pearl papers.” Every week we asked if she had finished grading them, and she said she would soon. Eventually, we understood we were never getting the papers back, so we took turns asking for them anyway just to harrass her. But this women was inscrutible and immutable.

Our academic reputations on the line, we couldn’t let it go. We began to document her faults as a teacher and specific instances of our lack of learning, including the Pearl paper debacle. If PowerPoint had existed, we would’ve had slides and graphs pointing downward and bullet points of damning facts and data we collected. We even met as a group to determine how best to present our case. We turned it into our own damn class project. We presented our findings to a teacher we trusted. She listened and reviewed our pages of documentation, and there was a pained expression on her face as she explained that Miss Satta had tenure. Seeing our blank faces, she spelled it out: Short of Miss Satta running through the halls naked, there was nothing she could do that would get her in trouble, including being shitty ass teacher.

We were shocked and upset. We’d followed the rules, pointed out the unbearable injustices we were enduring, and got rejected. We got nerd angry and decided there was only one thing left to do:

Toilet paper her house.

We looked up her address in the phone book, and one night piled into a station wagon and drove to her house. She had a big tree in her front yard, so we TP’d the hell out of it. And boy did it feel good. But we may have gotten carried away. There may have been red icing on hand and we may have left a frosting letter A on her mailbox, which we thought was a stroke of genius; it was also regrettable because we were likely the only class reading the damn book.

As is often the case with nerds, our flush of retaliatory success soon led to a deep fear of being caught and called down to, dear God, the principal’s office like those hoodlums we went to school with. And while we did sweat it out for a few days, we needn’t have worried. That relentlessly mediocre woman either didn’t notice our efforts or didn’t care enough to comment on them. She never gave us the satisfaction of her attention in the classroom or outside of it, nor did she ever return our Pearl papers.

But in the end, 30 years later, she gave me a good laugh and a good story as I walked through the tastefully toilet papered Beacon Hill, hold the red icing.