Dress Stress

"Hello?"

"Hi, I am going to be a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding and the dress needs some alterations. Can I make an appointment with you?"

"You have your bra and shoes, of course."

"Well...I hadn't really gotten that far yet."

"I can't help you unless you have your bra and shoes."

(Fidget, sigh, annoyed.) "Ok. I....I guess that makes sense. I just don't have them yet. Can I come in next week?"

"When's the wedding?"

"May 30."

(Horrified.) "OH NO! NOT ENOUGH TIME!"

"Ugh, well, I can come today but I don't have shoes or a bra."

(Snippity.) "There is nothing I can do for you. That's how it works. You have to have shoes and a bra. I can't do anything."

Angry. "Fine! I'll do it myself."

Click.

Ring, ring.

"Mom? Do you think I can alter my bridesmaid's dress on my own?"

"On your own?!"

"Yes. On my own. I have a sewing machine."

"I wouldn't even try. You might mess it up."

(Embittered, pouting.) "Ugh. I hate this process!"

(Judiciously.) "Honey? You have your shoes already, right?"

all in a day's work

I am only beginning to wrap my head around the fact that in three months, I will be leaving Minnesota. I am moving to Washington state to pursue an MFA in creative writing, which is incredibly exciting and exactly what I want to be doing, but it's also very sad to imagine leaving all of my students, friends, and favorite coffee shops. And the Minnesota Opera. And Summit Avenue in springtime. And the Ecopolitan. And, you know, many many things, kids, and people that I love.

It dawned on me yesterday, as I was teaching and encountering a string of write-able events, that when I leave piano teaching, I may not have anything left to write about. Which clearly defeats the purpose of pursuing an MFA. Of course, this just isn't true--there is always something to write about. But this stint as a traveling piano teacher has given me immense opportunity for storytelling.

For example, one of my young voice students, an excitable eight-year-old who loves High School Musical, said to me at the end of her lesson the other day, "Liz, I actually do have a question for you."

"Sure," I said. "What is it?"

She wrinkled her nose. "The song, 'I Won't Grow Up' makes me think of...popcorn."

I raised my eyebrows, not surprised at all that her "question" came in the form of a curious opinion. "Popcorn? That's interesting. Don't you like popcorn?"

"NO," she said definitively. "My mom has wheat allergies, and popcorn makes her tired. So any song that reminds me of popcorn just isn't fun to sing."

I smiled and told her that was just fine, we have plenty of other songs to sing, and that was that.

-------

I left her house to teach a longstanding piano student, an eleven-year-old who (not that I pick favorites) is one of my favorites. She has, however, taken to exhibiting lax practicing habits, which has put a bit of strain on our relationship. She is currently learning about major scales, which is incredibly exciting material for me. I speak in exaggeration exclamation points when teaching her about tetrachords and the circle of fifths. "And there are two tetrachords in every major scale! It's always the same! Just like puzzle pieces! Look, here is a song practicing your major scales!"

At her lesson the other day, when I went off into frantic scale-happy (ionian) mode, she rolled her eyes. "I don't want to play that song," she said.

"But it's called Jumpin' Jazz Cat! Using your Major Scales!"

"Liz," she said, disinterestedly and sounding quite annoyed, "I know this song has nothing to do with jazz or cats."

This same kid, however, quickly became animated when it was time for me to leave. Her mom and I were discussing my upcoming move to Washington, and out of nowhere, the kid stole my keys. "Now you can't leave!" she said, grinning devilishly.

"Lisa, I need my car keys. I'm not leaving for a few months. But right now I have to go to my next lesson. I'll see you next week."

Dejectedly, she looked at her watch and stared at the numbers and the ticking hands. "I'll be watching the clock, "she said.

-----

Lastly, I have one more story, from that same day. I have a five-year-old piano student who doesn't give two shits about playing the piano. He really, truly just doesn't care. At first, I took it personally and expended massive amounts of energy trying to get him to love piano lessons and learning to read music, but after a while I just gave up. I show up once a week to sit with him and encourage him to sit still long enough to find C Position, and that's about as far as we get.

This week, we were attempting to read some below-the-staff notes. Very, very slowly, he recited the note names by taking complete guesses each time. "Uh...G? C? D?"

I sat still and stared out the window. "No. Nope. No. No, not C. Nope."

"F? E? Um...C?"

"No. Nope."

This continued for a while, and finally I grew irritated. "LOOK at the staff," I growled in angry teacher voice. "THAT'S middle C. One below it is B. One above it is D. It's in ALPHABETICAL ORDER." I was gripping my pencil and smacking his book with the tip. The poor kid was clueless and now also feeling terrible.

Furiously, I scrawled out a worksheet for him on a piece of notebook paper. "HERE," I said, "Practice identifying the notes. Write in the note names."

The kid, with his gigantic brown eyes, silently took the paper and the pencil and stared at it blankly. I crossed my arms and sat back in my chair, a vague feeling of guilt tapping at the soft pump of my heart. I mean, poor kid. He really doesn't care about piano lessons, and here I was, giving him a hard time.

I turned to look at him, huddled over the impromptu worksheet, as he began to tentatively write on the page. I sighed, thinking, "Ah, now he knows what he's doing. That's all it took!"

Then I looked a bit closer. This kid who really truly doesn't give two shits about piano, was starting to write on the page...but as I inspected his markings further, I realized that he was drawing nonsense characters! Not A, B, or C. Not D, E, or F. No! He was drawing these bizarre symbols that weren't letters at all! (By the way, I know that this kid CAN read and write--I have seen it many times before.)

Suddenly, I realized how funny this whole argument was and started to laugh. "What the heck are you drawing, Joey?"

He looked at me with his big eyes and started giggling too. "I don't know," he said.

"Alright. Sorry I was impatient with you. Do you need some help?"

He nodded, and together we worked on the worksheet. I don't think he learned anything, or even that he cares any more about piano.

But sometimes the line between teacher and student is a blurry one, isn't it?

Absent: me

Recently, a kid I know said to me, "We have two cats here, Liz, so you should never bring over your dog."

I used to have a dog. With Stacia. That was last summer, in another life, and this kid would have no way of knowing this.

"What do you mean...my dog?" I asked, carefully. Had I mentioned Luna at some point? Perhaps in a mourning blackout? Or did this kid get the juice from the other, older kids at the pre-school, who knew me when I really did have a dog? Maybe there is an underground gossip circle among the five-year-olds. ("Jimmy, did you know that Spanish teacher Liz used to have a dog? Yeah, and then she left her lesbian relationship and lost all her parental rights. Now she can't keep the attention of her part-time undergraduate lover and has placed her cats in the care of a bunch of pot-riddled bachelors. She's really going downhill..")

"Your dog, silly," the kid said, as though I should know exactly what she was talking about. "The one you told us about!"

I tried to remember when on earth I had mentioned Luna. I have been very careful not to mention her over this past year because kids love animals and they love identifying outside-of-school family life, and the prospect of explaining a lesbian break-up to other people's children seems really complicated to me. How could I sufficiently explain that Luna is not my dog anymore, and that I never see her but that she still exists?

As I considered all of this, of course I felt that old pang of sadness rearing her weary head. I miss Luna. I miss Stacia. I miss that life sometimes. I miss the predictability of a puppy, of a partner. To make it all the more pertinent, I had recently discovered an issue of Animal Tracks, the Animal Humane Society's quarterly magazine, in which Stacia and Luna were featured.

Surprise! There is my old life, plastered on the glossy pages of a magazine.
Absent: me.

The article detailed Stacia's process of adopting Luna. How she chose her. How she named her. How she trained her. Indeed, in the real story, I was there for all of it. We chose her. We named her. We trained her. But of course, I was blaringly absent from the article. I mean, of course. Why on earth would Stacia mention me? (Oddly enough, though, her ex-ex-partner in Australia got a mention in the first paragraph!)

In any case, I stood there, trying to decide how to respond to this kid. I still, for the life of me, couldn't figure out how she knew that I used to have a dog.

"I told you about my dog?" I asked, confused.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Your dog. You know, Bingo!"

Then she burst into a rendition of the song Bingo in Spanish. "Un perro grande tengo yo, y ya se llama Bingo...." and I burst out laughing.

I teach that song in Spanish class. In Spanish, the words are a little different than the English version. Instead of the farmer owning the dog, the narrator owns the dog. Therefore, since I teach the song, I am always saying, in Spanish, "I have a big dog named Bingo."

This kid took it literally. She had no idea about Luna at all!

The encouraging part of this story is that I have never directly translated the meaning of that song. She understood the literal translation quite well! Next time I sing, "I have a big dog named Bingo," in any language, I will be prepared to end with a disclaimer about how the "I" in the song is actually a fictional narrator, not Spanish teacher Liz.

And if all those kids believe that I actually embody the narrator of these goofy songs, I must appear to have quite the enchanting life! I wonder what they think when I sing Puff the Magic Dragon. Or the song about dancing vegetables. Or the one about bear who combs his hair!