Sit on a Tack!

(This is the 25th blog entry and my last for a month. I’m going to the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, for a writing residency to finish my children’s novel, Sailboat in a Cellar, and am taking a blog hiatus to concentrate on that work. I’ll be back on September 21st. Thanks for reading and for all your comments!)

I was scared to death of going to Sunday School when I was a kid. Really. I liked God and Jesus, but I didn’t like church. I don’t think many people really do, or at least they don’t go for the right reasons. I’d like to take a poll and ask people, reminding them to be completely honest because their answers would remain anonymous, “Would you rather sleep in on Sunday or get up early and go to church?”

I was eight and it was 1980. Reagan was acting like a president. Jerry Falwell was riding the conservative tide and pushing his spiritual and ample physical girth on the Southern Baptist Convention. The church we attended at that time was Open Bible Baptist Church. We had left the Methodist denomination because my dad didn’t like the way the United Methodists were heading. The new church was cavernous: intimidating. We had gone from our town’s quaint turn-of-the-century, white clapboard church to a shiny new mammoth one that could hold up to five hundred believers, and with comfort-enhanced padded pews! (My grandmother, who didn’t leave the Methodist church, quipped: “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned sore hineys?”) Open Bible was also half an hour away, whereas our previous church was a five-minute drive. Now we had to leave earlier in the morning to get to church.

I didn’t know any children there. The two teachers that taught the class were a wife and husband team – let’s call them Joe and Mary – who “couldn’t make babies”. That’s what my sister, Kathy, told me. I didn’t know exactly what that meant. Did she mean they couldn’t sculpt a baby out of clay, or that they didn’t have a job at the baby factory because they didn’t have opposable thumbs? How did one actually craft a baby? Kathy said that the reason they taught Sunday School was because it was the only way they got to hang out with kids, and maybe if they were around them enough, some magic dust would wipe off on them and God would bless them with a child.

There were about four dozen children in the class; too many, and not one was friendly to me. I guess I shouldn’t say that. There was one kid who became immediately attached to me. He had Down’s Syndrome and his name was Angel. He was Puerto Rican. He loved making rather realistic butts out of play-dough. If we were studying Moses, it was Moses’ butt. If our subject was Job, it was Job’s butt, boils and all. Angel would laugh and laugh and I couldn’t help laughing, either, along with the rest of the class. Angel made farting sounds and held the butt up in the air, twirling it around like an airplane. We loved it. Joe and Mary, on the other hand, weren’t amused.

The cliques had been formed before we started attending the church and I, the new kid, was left with Angel. Some might say, “Well, you were a geek and children can sense this. They stay away from weirdos.” But I wasn’t that weird. Sure, I could actually read all the words in the Bible, even big words like “propitiation”. And yes, I wore baby blue button-down shirts with ties that matched, and pants whose cuffs broke right over my penny loafers like they should. My socks always matched, too. I was also one of the first kids I knew to wear brown shoes with navy blue pants. I was peerless and nicely pressed, just the way I liked it. (If my parents hadn’t figured out by then that I was a poof, then they were in a serious state of denial.)

I don’t think any chance of ingratiating myself into the Sunday School fold was helped by the desire at that age to have buck teeth. My friend at school, Gene, had them, and I wanted them, too. Gene’s were huge and stuck out over his lips like two gigantic playing cards. I’d sometimes stick my top teeth out past my lips, so I often looked a bit deranged, if not an appropriate friend for Angel. I didn’t think it was weird at the time.

The teaching duo had a ritual of bringing a child to their home every Sunday after church for lunch and an afternoon of fun and games! They did this alphabetically. After little Abby Steelman (the little strumpet with kinky hair who had eyes like a doll’s), I knew I was next.

I feigned sickness that Sunday, but my mom knew better.

“I don’t wanna go,” I said as my mom pulled down my small Snoopy traveling tote from the closet.

“You have to,” said my mom. “It’ll be fun.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re nice people. You’ll have fun, trust me.”

Well, then, I thought, maybe you should go instead.

Mommy packed a t-shirt and my bathing suit because Mary told her I’d be getting wet. She didn’t say how my body was to succumb to wetness, so I could only imagine. Were they going to hose me down at then end of the day behind the house? Make me wash their car? Take me to the local pool and make me swim in other children’s pee? At our own town pool I remember something resembling a large tootsie roll floating on top of the water. A friend thought it actually was one, but was quickly revolted to find out otherwise.

The first part of Sunday School involved drop-off. Open Bible had a Christian School behind the church where all the Sunday School classes were held. Kathy pushed me into the room and took off. Paper and crayons were spread around different tables. There were also some Ten Commandments and Jesus jigsaw puzzles some kids liked to do, screaming with delight when finished, “I made Jesus!” or, “What’s adultery?” I didn’t make eye contact with anyone, but simply sat down and doodled. The teachers then called us all over to the rows of aluminum chairs that were too big for us, our feet dangling above the floor like mini-pendulums.

We sang songs, and many had familiar tunes, like “Rahab”, a song about a prostitute from Jericho that was sung to the tune of “Bingo”: “And Rahab was her name-o!!!” Whenever I meet anyone who grew up in a Baptist church, I immediately sound off a few familiar opening notes and lyrics and the person’s eyes light up either in soulful recollection or horror; she or he is invariably able to finish the song as if on auto-pilot.

Here’s one in which you had to use your body as you sang. On the “inrights” you had to point at yourself, on the “outrights” you pointed away from yourself, etc.:

I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time
I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time.
Since Jesus Christ came in,
and cleansed my heart from sin,
I'm inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time!

There were some Sundays when I wasn’t happy, though. Why did I have to be happy all the time?

One particular song scared me because it conjured up the image of the devil, and telling the devil to sit on a tack seemed like a bad idea to me. The words below in caps are supposed to be shouted. Some kids shouted as loud as they could, screaming in my ears from both sides. Surrounded by overzealous shrieks, the song often left me shaking at the end:

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.
WHERE?!
Down in my heart!
WHERE?!
Down in my heart!
I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart,
WHERE?!
Down in my heart to stay.

And if the Devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack.
OUCH!
Sit on a tack.
OUCH!
Sit on a tack.
And if the Devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack.
OUCH!
Sit on a tack today.

Another song that sticks with me to this day was a militaristic one. Some might say its innocuous, but sometimes I really thought I was in the Lord’s army and that I had to fight for God, but often I thought, If God’s the ruler of the universe, why’s he need an army of kids?

I may never march in the Infantry, (march)
Ride in the cavalry, (pretend you're riding a horse)
Shoot the artillery. (fire pretend guns in the air)
I may never zoom o'er the enemy, (spread arms out and pretend to be a plane)
But I'm in the Lord's Army. (point one finger up to God)
I'm in the Lord's Army, yes, sir! (salute)
I'm in the Lord's Army, yes, sir! (salute)
I may never march in the Infantry, (repeat motions from above)
Ride in the cavalry,
Shoot the artillery.
I may never zoom o'er the enemy,
But I'm in the Lord's Army.
Yes, sir!

Developmentally, some children at age seven or eight are missing the component of their brains that allows them to have a good sense of the boundaries of their physical bodies. I learned this later in graduate school. On the “shoot the artillery” and “zoom” parts, inevitably I was struck on the face or poked in the back of the head. If Angel was next to me, I was guaranteed a few bruises.

After singing, Joe and Mary would put on a little bible lesson puppet show. Joe did his best to do different voices for different characters, but each one sounded the same: like Kermit the frog being run through a meat grinder. Sometimes they used a felt board with felt figures and houses and landscapes to tell a story, perhaps one about Ruth. I always wanted to play with that, but we weren’t allowed.

“If I let you play with it, Timmie,” Mary said, “then I have to let everyone play with it.”

Aaa, phooey! I thought. Play favorites, go ahead. I know you like me better than everyone else because I always raise my hand. Let them watch and suffer as I play with the felt board, especially Brandon for poking me in the eye last week!

Following this, we’d do some kind of craft in conjunction with the lesson. For the story of Joseph and his robe, we might make our own miniature rainbow-colored robe out of construction paper. At Easter we made crosses. I remember one kid colored his red and said it was from Jesus’ blood. Mary, aghast, her mouth agape, handed him another crayon and cross – “I think you should use brown. That’s the color of a cross.” I wanted to make paper Easter eggs and bunnies, but Joe said those things were pagan, hailing back to a goddess in Egypt named Ishtar. Apparently Easter was a day that commemorated the resurrection of a god called “Tammuz”, Ishtar’s son, who was believed to be the only begotten son of the sun god, Baal.

“Tammuz was killed by a pig,” said Joe. “That’s why we eat ham on Easter.”

“What’s pagan?” I asked.

“It’s satanic,” he replied.

When I told my mom this, she said, “I don’t care. We don’t worship Ishtar and there’s nothing wrong with an Easter Basket and eating chocolate bunnies.”

After church, Joe and Mary took me back to their home. I don’t know what Joe did for a job, but the place was a tiny ramshackle bungalow that he was fixing up in his spare time, he said. I felt sorry for them. I felt like they were poor. Not that my family was rich, but there was a difference in aesthetic. When I changed into my bathing suit and t-shirt, I found a quarter in my pants pocket. I’d forgotten to put it in the offering plate. I left it on the floor for Mary to find when I was gone, a tip, so to speak, for her hospitality.

Not only was I concerned about how I was going to get wet, but it should be known that I was a finicky eater back then, so I always fretted about what food I would be served whenever I went over someone’s house. The one thing I hate is seafood. Occasionally I’ll eat a shrimp, and I’ve been known to have a clam, as long as it’s sautéed in white wine, lemon, and butter. Whenever my mom made tuna fish salad, I’d have a ham sandwich instead.

What did Mary serve for lunch? Tuna casserole. My mom had told me that no matter what was served, I was to eat it – no fussing.

“Do you like tuna noodle casserole?” Mary asked.

“Love it!” I blurted out.

“Then I’ll give you an extra big helping.”

I was very hungry. The sugar cookies and Hawaiian Punch at church weren’t sticking to my ribs and my stomach rumbled like a dried up wooden rollercoaster at full speed.

I managed to pick through the dish and eat the egg noodles. Was that mayonnaise? Onions?! Celery? Yech! Occasionally a flake of tuna would make its way into my mouth. I immediately swallowed some watered down Kool-Aid to take the fishy taste away. When it was all done and told, the lunch from hell ended this way: me still hungry and a pile of tuna on my plate. It reminded me of when my dad would put a pill in our dog’s food. When the dog was finished, at the bottom of the bowl lay the solitary pill, so that my dad had to shove it down it’s throat.

After lunch, Joe took me to a local pond to catch guppies. This sounded promising and exciting, but I was still a bit wary.

“I don’t have to touch them, do I?”

“The guppies? We’ll catch ‘em with this.” He held up a mesh net on a wire, the kind someone might use with a fishtank.

I had a wonderful time catching the guppies. Joe explained to me how they would eventually grow legs and change into frogs and that when they did, I was to release them into another pond. I told him there was a pond in the woods behind our house. This guy Joe was okay, I decided. And I liked his car, too – an old VW Bug that rattled and was really noisy. I didn’t want to leave the pond, but the time eventually came when we had to go. I still hadn’t gotten wet, though, and I wondered if I was going to. Perhaps if I had fallen into the pond, I might have gotten wet. Maybe that’s what Mary meant – the bathing suit was only a precaution.

Mary had a snack for me when I got back: fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Wow. I wasn’t much of a dessert person, but chocolate chips cookies were my favorite, as long as they didn’t have nuts in them.

“Joe loves walnuts in his cookies,” she said as she passed the plate.

“Can I eat it outside?” I asked.

I went out the backdoor and sucked on the cookie, eating around the nuts, picking and spitting them out, until the cookie was gone and a handful of nuts remained. I threw them in the bushes and went back inside.

“Are you hot?” asked Mary.

“A little,” I said.

“Some kids next door are coming over and I’m going to turn on the sprinkler.”

Sprinkler? It would probably be better than a pee-sodden pool.

The kids who came over were of different ages and they were a lot of fun. We ran through the sprinkler, playing tag, throwing a big beach ball around. Joe and Mary watched and laughed. One kid was really fat. He looked like a young Curly from the Three Stooges and kept slipping on the wet grass, falling down and rolling around like a drenched piggy. I was soaking wet by the end of it.

Later, I dressed back into my church clothes and Joe and Mary drove me back home.

“I found a quarter in the bedroom,” said Mary. “Is it yours?”

“Nope,” I said.

After a few words with my mom, they left and Mommy came into my room where I was changing into my pajamas. “How was it?”

I nodded my head. “I actually had fun.” More fun than Sunday School.

Patience

I was an unremorsefully impatient child. Not all the time, but when I was, it was bad. I’m much more a model of patience now in my thirty-sixth year than I was in my sixth. My impatience grew to its all time high during my big pubescent transition from innocent kid to hormonal teenager. My angst expressed itself in fits of furious irritation over every little ding-dang thing. My mom and dad didn’t always understand where all this was coming from, and neither did I.

Mommy had an innate gift of patience with her children. It didn’t mean she didn’t get angry with us or lose her temper, but this was only occasionally, while mine was a matter of daily uncertainty, something my mom hoped wouldn’t last in perpetuity. It didn’t. I’ve mellowed out more and more with each passing year, but I do remember one moment as a little boy, an awfully embarrassing one that could have scarred me for life and enervated my self-esteem had my mom reacted differently than she did, which was delicately and with the utmost love and patience. Through actions, not words, we learn.

I grew up in the woods where there were no sidewalks, no corner deli, no place for kids to hang out and cause trouble other than the old beech tree on the edge of what we called Indian Grass Hill. The tree was scarred from various engravings of hearts and romantic epigraphs along the lines of “Laurie + Stevie”. There was also the occasional “Brian = Horse Puckey” or “Jeffrey eets boogers”.

Be that as it may, any opportunity to flee the woodsy environs and take a trip to the strip mall or even better, The Echelon Mall five towns over, was as welcomed as if I’d been offered a all-expense paid trip to Disneyland. That’s what happened one balmy summer Tuesday evening when my mom walked into my room, a foggy trail of Aquanet hairspray dissipating behind her, and asked, “Wanna go to KMart with me?”

I think I was six years old at the time, maybe five. Kathy joined us on our little excursion. Mommy had to get some toilet paper, paper towels, and a few other odds and ends. When we arrived, we decided to separate, agreeing to meet back at the front of the store in thirty minutes. My mom told me not to talk to strangers and then we parted.

Kathy always went to the hair products section. She was determined to dye her hair blonde, even against my parents’ wishes. I think it may have come from her early childhood obsession with Farrah Fawcett. Mommy told her repeatedly: “I don’t trust those cheap hair coloring kits and we can’t afford to take you to the salon.” Kathy inevitably sighed and offered to save up her pennies for a dye job, but Mommy wouldn’t have it. These were times that truly tested my mom’s patience. At the time, Kathy was only a teenager. What I didn’t know then was that Kathy was even more impatient than me. She was also what Grandmom called a “conniver”.

I immediately made a beeline for the toy section. The toys were cheap at KMart and I could always persuade my mom to buy me some little piece of plastic junk that I simply had to have, but probably didn’t need. Star Wars was still fresh in the collective conscious, but the action figures were often too expensive. I found an obscure character. I think it was a Death Star Trooper that apparently nobody wanted because it was on sale – three dollars! Oh boy! I was sure I could talk my mom into it.

I picked up the toy from the sale bin, looked up at the clock on the wall, and saw that I still had fifteen minutes before I had to meet Mommy and Kathy. Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my stomach and I farted. Then there was another digestive tract pain, and then something dropped inside me. I had to go to the bathroom. Really bad. I couldn’t believe it. One second I’m fine, browsing the action figure section of KMart and the next I gotta take a mean number two. It was all I could do to hold it in.

I remember it all clearly. I stopped in front of a “My Buddy” doll. It was a small boy doll with blonde hair. He wore red overalls and a baseball cap and was probably about two-feet tall. The ads said you could take him with you anywhere! (“My buddy and me like to climb up a tree” went the jingle.) I always wanted one, but never admitted it to anyone.

I was too scared to ask anyone where the bathroom was. Besides, I didn’t like using public restrooms: they were always so dirty and you never knew whose butt had sat down on the seat before you. I couldn’t walk because I knew if I did, I’d lose it, so I stood there, motionless, the only movement being the beads of sweat starting to roll down my brow.

An older kid walked by me and regarded me squarely, standing in front of “My Buddy”. He snarled, “Those are so gay,” and walked away. I knew they were gay! I never wanted one – never – but I couldn’t help it if I was stuck in front of this gay little boy’s doll, Playschool’s answer to Barbie for boys. I knew that, you gunkey person, you!

I moaned quietly, I held my stomach, and then I couldn’t wait any longer. Nobody was in sight. The coast was clear. I let it go right into my underwear and it was both the best and worst feeling at the same time. I had relief, but I was left with an unwanted gift in my shorts. Oh no! I panicked. I could smell it. It was gut-wrenching. Just then Kathy walked by, a shimmering ghost at the end of the aisle, and I gasped, “Kathy!”

She turned, walked down the aisle, and then started waving her hand around. “Geez Louise, what died?!”

I quickly explained and Kathy, bless her heart, was sympathetic and didn’t say one disparaging remark. She hustled me down the main aisle towards the front door and outside. I think she did so because she might have been more embarrassed to be caught with smelly ol’ me, rather than it being some act of kindness. I knew I was leaving a stinky, foul trail of stench behind me, but I didn’t care – I had to get outta there. Kathy stopped me in front of the little horsey ride outside the store and told me to stay put until she got Mommy.

“And don’t sit down,” she said sternly.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Can you take this back to the toy section?” I held up the Death Star Trooper figure. Kathy grabbed it and it wasn’t until then that I noticed she was holding a plastic bag. She had bought something, but right then I didn’t care to ask bupkis.

She was back in five minutes with Mommy in tow. We hightailed it to the car and before I could sit down in the backseat, Mommy said, “Don’t sit down! It’ll make it worse!” Right. Gotcha. We opened all the windows and my mom put the petal to the proverbial metal.

Mommy patiently turned the wheel at every turn and all the while she never yelled, never asked me why I didn’t try to find a bathroom, never even wanted to know why the heck I took a crap in my underwear: a paragon of understanding and patience. In fact, I remember us laughing about it on the car ride home. She simply let the incident go as quickly as I had let it go in KMart’s Aisle 5.

When we got home, she took me into the bathroom, handed me a garbage bag, and told me to put the underwear in it, seal it tightly as if it was radioactive waste, and then take a shower. There was no way she was going to wash my Superman Underoos. It was easier to just send them off to some unknown South Jersey landfill. I still miss those Underoos to this day and think it would be a great Generation X marketing ploy to make them in sizes for us 30-somethings.

Later that night Mommy walked into my room to tuck me. She turned on the fan by the window. To this day I always love a fan on during a warm summer eve. The steady drone and breeze puts me to sleep like a baby. My mom sat down on the edge of the bed. Even in the strong breeze from the fan, her hair didn’t move. That Aquanet sure was great stuff! She then handed me the Death Star Trooper action figure. “Next time,” she said, patting me on the arm, “can you please just ask where the bathroom is…and use it?”

I agreed and thanked her for the gift.

She kissed me, told me she loved me, and said, “Now, I’ve got to deal with your sister.”

“What’d she do?”

Her face flushed and her eyes narrowed. “The little conniver bought a hair coloring kit.”

Cement Mixer

There are many gifts my mother gave me during her transcendent life here on Mama Earth. One gift she gave me was one of music. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s an indelible part of my daily existence, and this from a woman who didn’t know Bach from Beethoven or Brahms. She knew the songs from the late 30s, the 40s, and early 50s. She'd played piano since she was six and her determination for me - and all my sisters - to play was indefatigable, and I thank her for it every time I sit down on the stool and stare down at the ivories.

When I was six years old, Mommy demanded (very judiciously) that I take piano lessons, and when I did, she made me practice every day. In the beginning I hated it. I couldn’t play worth a tinker’s cuss. At that young age, if I had a choice, I would have summarily given up after the first lesson, but she wouldn’t have it. If she could play, then by gum, I could, too.

A mother at the school where I taught once told me that she was having problems with her son. “He won’t practice the piano,” she said, and then asked, “How did your mother get you to practice?”

I didn’t mean to, but I let out a little bleat of a laugh because the question seemed ridiculous to me. Her son wasn’t old enough to decide for himself and some things you just gotta do in life because Mama says so! (I'm not a Dickensian schoolmaster, but I do believe there’s too much coddling of children. As Garrison Keillor said, and I paraphrase: "Nowadays it's four strikes and you're out because doesn't Little Johnny deserve one more chance?")

“Uh,” I said, “I really didn’t have a choice. She made me do it.”

A flicker of enlightenment passed over her eyes as if to say, “I’d never thought of that.” When I saw her weeks later, I asked her how it was going with her son. “It’s going well,” she replied, “because now he doesn’t have a choice.”

Mommy said there was a song for everything and every situation. I scoffed at this as a teenager until one day when we were driving down to Ocean City for an afternoon at the beach. We came to a detour and she sang, “Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…detour….”

“Is that really a song?” I asked.

“Yes, an oldie,” she said. “There’s a song for everything.”

“No, there isn’t.”

Just then we pulled up at a stoplight and in front of us was one of those cement mixer trucks. You know the kind – the truck part is in the front and on top is a giant cylinder rolling round and round mixing the cement so it doesn’t harden.

My mom sang out, “A puddle o’ vooty, a puddle o’ gooty…cement mixer, putty putty…cement mixer, putty putty….”

She went on to sing the entire song. “Liberace used to sing it,” she said when she finished, and that’s when I truly realized that my sapient mother was right – if there was a song for a cement mixer, then there certainly was a song for everything else in the world.

My first teacher was Mrs. Durand, a lady who lived in the town next to us. I’m not sure how my mom heard of her, but someone must have recommended her. Every Wednesday I was at her house by 3:30 for a half hour lesson. Her three kids got out of school after me, so they usually arrived home by 3:45. They lay on the rug in the living room, sucking on lollipops, crunching potato chips, gnawing on the piano bench leg, all the while watching me and their mom at the piano, her correcting my tempo, me seething at being watched by the cretins crawling around underneath the bench, snickering behind me.

Mrs. Durand taught me the fundamentals: reading music, a little fingering, and tempo. After a year, Mrs. Durand told my mom, “I can’t teach him anymore. He needs another teacher.”

That’s when Miss Growl came into the picture. She was the music teacher at my grammar school, and I’m not kidding when I say her name was really Growl, but she was a beauty. I was infatuated with her. She was statuesque and had a mellifluous voice. I wanted to play my all for her, and I did. In two years, I had gotten to the same point as I had with Mrs. Durand: time for a new teacher.

I don’t know how my mom found out about Mrs. Davis, but she did her research. Mrs. Davis was a myopic little wisp of a lady with horn-rimmed glasses who lived in a large house that I thought was a mansion. Her husband worked at Mobil Oil where my dad worked, but they didn’t know each other – different divisions: blue collar (my dad) and white collar (Mr. Davis).

By the time I began instruction with Mrs. Davis, I was ten years old and ready for the great classical composers; that’s all she taught. There were no trite little ditties with insipid titles like “Going to the Circus” or “The Happy Chicken”; it was pure classical training and I ate it up. It’s what I’d been waiting for since I'd seen the ad on TV.

It happened one Saturday afternoon, probably a year before I started lessons with Mrs. Davis. I watched television and on came an ad for Time Life Books’ inimitable collection of classical music. Three hundred selections of the world's most famous music ever written! Incredible! All for four easy payments of $9.99. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. I had to have it. I begged, I borrowed from my sister, I even stole two dollars from my dad’s spare change jar. My mom ordered it, supplementing the balance as part of my birthday gift, and when it arrived, I unwrapped the plastic cassettes as if they were four miniature holy grails. I think I even heard an angelic choir from up on high as I inserted the first cassette into our stereo, plugged in the headphones, lay down on the floor and closed my eyes. Da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaa! Beethoven. 5th Symphony. I had chills – the good kind.

The thing about the Time Life Books tapes was that the selections were only snippets of the themes from the great classical works. They never said in the ad that the music wasn’t presented in its entirety. If I were more mature I would have realized that the world’s three hundred most beloved classical masterpieces would have never fit on four cassette tapes. One got maybe a minute or two of each opus, and that was it. For years I thought Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was one minute and forty-two seconds long.

It was a fortuitous time when I started with Mrs. Davis. I was the only one in the family who was listening to classical music. Kathy’s fave was John Denver. I had no idea what Cindy or Sandy were listening to because they were in college. I think they listened to Sandy Patti. My mom and dad listened to the occasional easy listening or Christian radio station. My world, my musical universe was filled with symphonies, minuets, arias, and scherzos. Mrs. Davis was the one who showed me that I could play the music I loved.

When I first walked in, she said, “Sit down. Play something.”

My mom had bought me a piano book with short pieces by famous composers. I played a little Mozart piece I had taught myself.

“All right. I’ll take you on as a student.”

I hadn’t realized that it was an audition. If I had, I probably would have wet my Scooby-Doo Underoos.

I studied with Mrs. Davis for five years, and all the while my mom was there as the patient listener in the kitchen, with me practicing while she cooked dinner, or cleared the table, or sat down for a cup of tea.

She was a master of reverse psychology. When I was at my most frustrated during the learning process, when I banged at the piano with hammer hands and threw my books on the floor and stomped on them, her voice, like a zephyr, floated into the living room from the kitchen: “That sounded great, Timmie. Play it again for me.”

Huh? I thought it sounded awful. I either couldn’t get the fingering right, or the tempo was all wrong, or I just didn’t like the piece of music. But all the time, no matter how poorly I played, my mom was there to encourage me by telling me – even though she was probably cringing in the kitchen – that I sounded great.

That bolstered me. I would sit down and play it again. She would encourage me more, complimenting me, asking me to play it again and again. I did, until finally, I knew the piece forwards and back.

Even though my mom didn’t listen to classical music and had no education in it, she inadvertently opened me up to this world of music that I hadn’t known. By making me take lessons, encouraging me during bad days when my fingers didn’t seem to synch with what I was reading on the page, finding the right piano teachers for me, she led me down through the archway of musical transcendence. She gave me a gift that I will have for a lifetime.

During the last few years of my mom’s life, when I was home I often sat down at the piano and played the classical music she loved. By listening to me over the years, she developed her own kind of resonance with it. She enjoyed some of the Debussy I played, several of the Mozart sonatas, and Beethoven’s “Pathetique”. She’d sit in the loveseat next to the piano in the sunroom and listen, sometimes falling asleep, but always there when I sat down to play.

F. and I went to see a movie the other day. When we got back to the apartment, he went outside to work on a sculpture and I opened up a book of Mozart Sonatas to a Sonata in F Major that my mom always asked me to play. She’s gone, but she’s not. She’s with me always, and while I played I felt that she was in my own kitchen, over the sink, washing my dishes, saying, “That sounds great, Timmie. Play it again for me.”