It was a November day and I was one of a swarm of 62 second graders at St. Bede The Venerable Grammar School. I'd had a bumpy landing in grammar school and still spent most of my days in a state of utter bafflement. It would be decades before I realized that most everyone else did, too.
We were herded into the weird big room downstairs from our classroom where they made us do extracurricular stuff. The curricular activities were bad enough; I had just figured out that the four reading groups into which we were divided were based on proficiency and that my group, the Bluebirds, was not top of the line by any means.
Sister Mulua stood us on a bunch of risers. St. Bede's was governed by the Irish branch of the Sisters of St. Louis. They were very, very young Irish women who had joined up for reasons it doesn't bear thinking of and been shipped posthaste to the wilds of Southern California. My parents were Ireland-loving Irish-Americans, and even as a child, I had a dim perception that the bare, hot, asphalt-becalmed convent next to St. Bede's probably looked as remote from their homeland as the planet Mars, and less welcoming.
Some volunteer mother started to play the piano. Sister blew into a weird round thing that made a buzzy musical sound and told us to start singing scales. Singing! I loved singing! I already knew all the words to the songs my older siblings were dancing to; "Little Darlin" and "Peggy Sue" and "School Day" and "Jailhouse Rock." What could go wrong when you were singing?
I sang with everyone else and with zest, up the scales, back down them, jumping up two notes and down one, as directed by Sister (who, now that I think about it, was probably musically gifted and this was the one thing she looked forward to in her grim New World experience).
Then it all went wrong.
We were working on a fairly complicated set of scale steps and I was noticing with pleasure that I could easily distinguish my particular voice among the rest, when Sister Mulua put her hands to her ears, or as near as she could get to them given the construction of her habit:
Sisters of St.Louis (generic ones)
"Stop," she said. Her very scary eyebrows rose and she appeared to be in pain.
We stopped.
"You," she said, and pointed at us. I looked around for the miscreant. But everyone else turned in balletic unison and looked at me. This wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last time that happened. But why?
"Stand over there," Sister said, and pointed me to about ten feet in front of the risers and facing them. "And don't sing. Just move your lips." I shuffled over to the virtual stocks and she started everyone else back on the scales again. The afternoon stretched on into eternity while I stood there and all my classmates stared at me and I tried to slide over into another dimension.
When I got home after a century or so I told my mother the story. I'm sure I cried.
My parents regarded school as outside their jurisdiction. We were supposed to go to it, make our own way, and bring home good grades. They listened to our stories about it more like literary critics than anything else; being able to tell a good story was an important skill. So I was very surprised when my mother hightailed it over to St. Bede's like an vengeful cyclone. I never heard what transpired there exactly, but I had the uneasy sense that the gods of my world were battling and that the struggle could shake its foundations.
But Sister Mulua appeared to be unharmed the next day and took no more notice of me than usual. When we went to the big room of shaming, she arranged us all on the risers in a triangle shape and put me alone on the top one, the tip of the triangle.
"Just move your lips," she said to me. And then she taught everyone the song. You know what the song was? It was "Every Little Girl Would Like to Be The Fairy on The Christmas Tree." That's why we were in a triangle -- we were shaped like a Christmas tree, and I was on the top. Get it?
And that was me. That was I. The fairy on the Christmas tree. For the Christmas concert for the parents. I had to stand up there by myself on the top row in my First Communion dress (so as to be "dressed in white"), holding a wand and being the fairy on the Christmas tree. Which wasn't even accurate. Nobody at St. Bede's put a heathen fairy on a Christmas tree. Everyone had stars on the Christmas trees, or angels if they liked to push the envelope. It was a Protestant song! Infidel, Sister Mulua!
And that was the story of my musical life. Every time there was a group song, the Sister of the moment told me to just move my lips. I was one of only six who had to stay in class and didn't get to go to the eighth grade Altar Boy/Choir Girl/Choir Boy Picnic and thereby missed the epic fistfight between Mary Connell and Joyce Bailey (Mary won with a hard right to the nose).
When I got to high school, the highly sophisticated Mayfield School of the Holy Child, and it was time for a concert, the music teacher would put me in with the altos and tell me to move my lips. 48 years later, I still know the alto part, words and music, to "Hymn to Saint Cecilia" which we sang at graduation. Or everybody else sang, rather. I moved my lips.
And it's a really weird one:
And by ocean's margin this innocent viiiiirgin
Constructed an ooooorgan to enlarge her prayer,
Aaaand notes tremendous from her great engine thundered out
On the Roooman air.
Oh well. When the cosmos closes one door, it opens another. By the end of second grade I'd zoomed to the top of the Robins reading group (and they
were the top) and Sister Mulua and I were cool. And I know the lyrics to practically every rock n roll song of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Even if I only sing them in the shower.
Oh, and by the way. I can attest that NOT every little girl would like to be the fairy on the Christmas tree.