Still Crazy After All These Years

I just had a strange, sad little interlude.  The really nice kid next door decided to be baptized into the LDS faith, and I was asked to lead the music at the meeting tonight.  I love leading the music in the big church meetings – I’m really far away from everybody, and I fondly believe that nobody can actually hear me.

But these baptisms are held in the primary room that usually accommodates anywhere from one to maybe sixty kids from three to twelve—a long, narrow brick room, maybe 40 feet long.  And I had to stand at the very front while the piano was at the very back.  And about a hundred people came – people from the high school, and from the ward he’d been attending (with his buds) and from the football team and from our ward, all these people who love the kid, crammed into this narrow little room—and there were only maybe thirty hymn books to go around.

It was a pretty cool thing, really.  Pretty emotional for everybody involved.  I stood there in front of all those people, many of them strangers, and I was miles away from the piano.  They kept talking right through the introductory bars of the hymn.  And it seemed to me that the pianist, who is a wonderful woman and was a saint to agree to play tonight, had suddenly started playing very softly.  It was one of my favorite hymns.

Finally, I held up my hands, wondering why they hadn’t shut up already, and they started to sing.  And so did I.  Just like I always do.  Trying to guide the piano with my voice – because she couldn’t read her music and see me at the same time forty feet away.

And that’s when it happened.  There was this whole row of high school girls sitting on the front row, right in front of me,  girls who were suffering, evidently, a super crush on this young man we were honoring.  And the second I started to sing, they looked up at me and began to snicker.  These girls had to be seventeen or so, sitting like one foot away from me, but they kept looking up at my face, then turning to each other and rolling their eyes and laughing and half covering their mouths while they smirked.  I was amazed.

Do nasty little girls like this really believe that the person standing right in front of them can’t SEE them?  Do they think they are surrounded by some little bubble of invisibility that allows them to mock people who are looking directly down at them?  I used to see this in class sometimes, like one year when I was teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we got to the part where Bottom marches around declaring that his friends had made an ass of him.  My idiot students started doing that cover your mouth and smirk thing.  I stopped the lecture and said, “Are you stupid?  What, you think I don’t GET IT?  I GET IT.  Shakespeare GOT IT.  That’s why he WROTE IT that way.”  But them, I knew.  Them, I could call on the carpet.  I could correct the behavior and the disabuse them about the invisibility.

Even the second hymn, during which there were utterly no speed discrepancies between the front and the back of the room, and I could sing much more quietly, they did the same thing.  They started the very moment I stood up there.  Like, did I have spinach stuck in my teeth?  Whatever it was, suddenly I was right back in high school again, with no defense against the mean, nasty little girls.  Still no defense, after all these years.  You’d think I’d be stronger than that.

I wanted to stop the singing and say to them, “Look you little idiots, what I know, what I have done in my life, what I am capable of makes you look like dust mites on a bad mirror.  So just shut up.”  And I wanted to say, “You know what?  You fail.  I’m failing you.  Big fat “F” for you guys.”

But I couldn’t do that, of course.  And I shouldn’t have wanted to.  Just proves my utter lack of confidence in myself, my weak-kneed conviction that really, I’m awful and that I should never open my little mouth.  Even now, I’m just ashamed I would let those little jerks get to me that way.  How I keep thinking things like, what kind of mother raises a girl who could be so shallow and ugly to people?

So instead of walking out of there in the glow I should have been feeling.  I walked out like somebody who wished she had a sack to put over her head.  What’s wrong with me?

One thing this did make me realize is how safe I feel in my own ward.  How deeply I depend on the love and kindness I find there. They are good to me, miserable little nebbish as I am.  This morning, before all this happened, I looked out over that congregation and felt my heart actually swell up with gratitude for the friends and neighbors and even kind almost strangers I saw sitting in those pews.  They never snigger.  At least, not so’s I can see it.

Bless their hearts.