Little Girl, Big Voice

Plato Was Right (Day 50)

Little Bean steps up to the mic and in a loud, steady voice, she introduces the school choir drummers and thanks the audience of parents for coming. Of all the kids that had speaking roles in this third grade holiday concert, I only could hear my daughter.

She has a big voice. She’s not afraid to use it.

The third graders whip through a pleasant enough group of standard holiday/winter fair, songs dealing with hot chocolate and snowballs and the aforementioned drumming seasonal song. My daughter sings at the top of her lungs, and throughout I wonder if it’s just me that can hear her so clearly because I’m familiar with her voice or if she really is drowning out her classmates.

No matter. The elementary school holiday concert is a rite of passage and I’m happy Little Bean is enjoying her time in choir. She likes her teacher a lot and hopefully, that teacher will become her piano teacher in the new year as well

Little Bean opens the concert for her class.

There’s a certain… inevitability… about this - my wife and I and Little Bean’s grandma sitting on those hard benches in a cold gym listening to the high pitched, enthusiastic, mostly in tune, group of songs sung by 30 eight and nine year olds dressed in red and green and barely wrangled by a teacher with the super power of keeping all those kids singing and not falling off the stage.

This is parenting is what I’m saying. This is how to do it. I think. Anyway, this is how my parents tried to do it. When I played guitar (terribly) in third or fourth grade as part of my holiday concert, or had to memorize parts of Star of Bethlehem in Polish for that one show. There was my mom, right there, clapping away, grinning like a maniac as I murdered whatever I was singing or playing.

And here we are doing the same. We do it because music is good. Because she needs music in her life. Even if she forgets the words. Even if her voice cracks.

Plato himself understood. He said that “Music is the sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.” That’s a fancy way of saying that music makes us good people.

So I take time off work and I go and it’s fine. We chat with other parents. Catch up on school business. Applaud really hard after every song.

Will any of this - the live shows, the CDs in the car, the performing, the music lessons - will any of it stick? Will she become a concert pianist or an opera singer or a tattooed bass player of a power metal band? Who knows.

But I do know this. After the show, a bunch of us parents go up to the front as the kids are coming down off the stage to head back to class and Little Bean sees me and runs to me and gives me a big hug.

Right there. A hug. In front of all her friends and everything.

“You did fantastic!” I say.

“Thanks daddy,” she says, rejoining her class as they head back to school.

“You’re welcome, baby,” I say to her back as she fades into the crowd. I turn and walk out into the rain, my little opera singer’s voice echoing, out of key, in my head all day.