Xylophone Lessons

Xylophone Lessons

I’m a product of the pubic school system when it was an impressive place to learn, even in the inner city. When I attended grammar school, teachers were regarded as the most highly educated people in the community, were respected, and were authoritarian. In Hudson School, in Union City, NJ, there were perhaps 30 teachers, only one of whom was male.

The school itself was a former cheese factory of some kind, a three-story structure where the janitors were forced to place traps in the dank corners in the winter to control the rats and mice which, through countless generations, had populated the place. The cheese was simply a dim, racial memory for the current vermin.

In the third grade, I was the kind of kid you probably hated. I was teacher’s pet, vied with a nerdy girl named Carolyn for top honors in every category, and was saved from extinction by the fact that I was also one of the best schoolyard athletes around.

About once a month, a special teacher would visit us in Miss Mandelkern’s third-grade classroom. Her job was to focus on spelling and language, and she would be allotted about an hour of classroom time. I don’t recall her name, but she was quite old (especially to a third-grader), and wore a horrible wig, which was immediately identifiable because it was always skewed somewhat to starboard.

One day she launched an exercise to have us provide a word that began with each letter of the alphabet. As others volunteered “cow” and “dog” I bided my time.

Sure enough, we arrived at “X.” I waited, a cheetah on the savanna, poised for a monumental explosion of speed. A girl offered “X-Ray.”

“No,” said the special teacher, “that has a hyphen.”

I allowed the silence to continue for several delicious seconds, then up shot my hand. Miss Mandelkern beamed.

“Xylophone!” I pronounced, as my classmates stared in envy (or it could have been revulsion).

“No,” said the special teacher, “that starts with a ‘Z.'”

Miss Mandelkern lost eye contact with me as I slumped back, stunned. My classmates began to snicker. I don’t remember what happened after that, I may have wound up in the nurse’s office.

Later that day, one of my friends said, “I looked it up over lunch. ‘Xylophone’ does start with ‘X.’ You were right!”

I learned from that 8-year-old experience the following:

1. A position of authority does not create infallibility.
2. Those in authority often back each other, at least through passivity, ignoring (or even harming) the customer.
3. Life isn’t fair. You can be right and still fail.
4. If you feel powerless, you can be easily cowed by those with power, even when they’re wrong.
5. I would never, ever, let anyone tell me that “xylophone” begins with anything other than an “X” for the remainder of my life (though I do now keep “xanthic” and “xenium” in reserve).

I don’t care what’s on your business card or how many initials you have after your name. What you tell me had better make sense and not contradict what I know to be true. Play that on your marimbas.

© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.