During circle time in kindergarten, the teacher once told us the person who could twitch their nose the hardest would get to be Peter Rabbit and lead the bunny parade around the gym after naptime. I sat there twitching my nose, knowing that I just had to be chosen, but I wasn’t. It was the first thing I remember being crossed off my list of potential futures.
In grade 6 the principal came into the class after we had all been given intelligence tests and said that one of us was really smart. And then there was the pause, the moment that lasted a thousand years while we waited, each of us believing our moment had arrived. I knew that it had to be me but, no, it was Alex Tilford, and like the bunnies, there was another thing, being a genius, off the list.
In grade 6 music class, the teacher divided us into groups according to singing ability. The girls were all in groups like the Larks and the Robins and the Bluebirds. The rest of us were in the Crows. We had this new kid in our class, Bill McClintock, who had come from the United States and was kind of a loser. To make matters worse, the music teacher put him in the Larks. His life was pretty miserable at first, as miserable as life can be for someone who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the grade 6 students. A thinking person would have thought that that was pretty much it for Bill McClintock.
But sometimes, even a thinking person can be surprised. Just when you think it’s all over, that you’ve had your moment, you’ve been observed, you end up somewhere else, not yet particle-doomed, suddenly, miraculously redeemed, waviness plucked from the precipice of particle preordination. A while after all and sundry mordantly assumed McClintock’s die had been cast, the music teacher gave us a fifty question multiple-choice test and he got 0 out of 50. We all knew he wasn’t smart enough to have known all of the right answers, let alone to have then planned to only put down the wrong ones. You didn’t even have to be Alex Tilford to figure out the odds of achieving a perfect zero were completely astronomical. In his misery, he had been observed, had become the mote in God’s eye, and God had taken pity on him. It was clear he had the mark upon him. He was an instant hero.
It may even have been Bill McClintock who came up with our morning pastime. Our classroom was on the second floor. The teacher allowed us to use the fire escape to go out for recess. Between opening bell and recess, all the boys would work up giant goobers in their mouths and then spit them out at the top of the steps on our way out, seeing who had the largest. During the morning you had to try not to get asked any questions because the spit drooled out if you had to speak. Labeled a crow, cross singer off my list as well.
One day, my parents said they would buy a piano if I would take lessons for a year. I was stunned. In what kind of demented parental logic did that make sense? I didn’t want a piano and I certainly didn’t want to be stuck taking lessons for a year when I could be watching Johnny Jellybean on TV. Johnny who guided our young lives with homespun wisdom.
“You never know what lonesome is until you get to herding cows, ” he told us.
Nor had I ever shown any musical ability whatsoever. There honestly was a good reason I was a crow. However, there is a certain determinism about these things, I now understand, and the next thing you know, there I was taking piano lessons to my sisters’ vast amusement. How they got out of it I’ll never know.
The piano teacher was one of those types who randomly whacked your knuckles with a ruler, one of those dried up old specimens, bitter they had been passed over in the auditions for the Wicked Witch of the North. The whole piano ordeal lasted about eight months before everyone gave up. You can only listen to the “Song of Joy” played with pathological hatred so many times. Musician off the list.