Remember when you could sing?  Some people still can, but I could only sing when I was a kid.  My mother and grandmother taught me to sing.  My grandmother, for reasons that escape me, knew all the words to the Marine Hymn, so I know all the words to the Marine Hymn.  She knew the words to You’re a Grand ‘Ole Flag, and I still do.  I could sing then, and I did, and I loved it!  Singing took me to places that I couldn’t go otherwise - to places where I had confidence and where I had a voice.

Something happened in junior high school though, and the singing stopped.  At the end of 7th grade, after my first year of chorus class, I tried out for the Swansonettes, our schools’ all-girl singing group.  That year, they just didn’t need another alto, and so I didn’t make it.  Most 7th graders don’t make it - it was more of a thing for 8th graders.  That said, I should have been resilient.  I should have appreciated the experience, appreciated that I was very close, and taken Ms. Finlator’s advice: take another year of chorus, and be a virtual lock at the end of 8th grade. I was emotionally gutted though, and I felt betrayed by a teacher that I loved, and by a confidence that I felt I had clearly misplaced.  That was the day I stopped being able to sing.

I took up acting in the 8th grade, and let’s be clear - I can NOT act!  My mother has a very unattractive story about a role I played in our school’s version of Flowers for Algernon.  The “good news” was that everyone in the auditorium could hear me.

This story about my childhood makes it ever so clear to me about how I came to have the strengths and the weaknesses that I have as an adult.  I write because I was encouraged to do so.  Writing, like singing, was easy for me.  I always liked English class, and I read all the time - hiding for much of my life behind the pages of someone else’s book.  I’m lousy at math.  My best friend Kathy did all my math homework for 7th-9th grade, and I did all her English.  We both usually got A’s.  I still write and read and she’s brilliant at Accounting.  We were a great team!

Even now, there are days when I wish I could sing, and even some when I think I still can.  Then I remember though, and I pick up a pen.  Can you hear me now?