Choices
Thursday Morning As I take attendance, my voice rolls out just like my high school theatre teacher taught me. “Enunciate to the back row,” I can hear her booming in her high, clear voice. That voice still rattles around in my head, reminding me how to project and how to capture the attention of a room. Unfortunately, the buzzing in the classroom muffles the sound of students announcing their presence. Sounds do not carry well in this room. Some of the ceiling tiles are missing, and there are enough layers of paint on the windows to make opening them an Olympic feat–a feat I attempt every day to atone for the lack…
Employment. Finally.
I have a job now. I blinked my eyes forcefully and next thing I knew I was filling out HR forms and getting a TB test. In fact, it happened almost by accident. After completing my annual exercise in futility, i.e., applying for teaching jobs all over the Southland, I pushed aside my fear and asked a friend from grad school how she got her job and if she could pass along any words of wisdom. Only a few emails later and the school called me in for an interview, hiring me within five minutes of interviewing. I left the room feeling immensely giddy and slightly confused in my uncomfortable suit. I have…a job?…
Beautiful Music
In another life I was a piano teacher. I had quit the piano at age ten, like most kids, in a fit of impatience with my elderly teacher and a disinterest in practicing. I didn’t want to play the songs from my grandparent’s childhood found in John Thompson’s Modern Course for the Piano (circa 1936), I wanted to play the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique. I wanted to play beautiful music. After a few years of piano-free existence, at thirteen, using the knowledge I’d accumulated from all those years of lessons, I taught myself Für Elise. It took about a year of unsteady practice, and after mastering that I moved…