Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

Early morning phone chat with my sister: she wants me to go online for her -- she needs to order flute pedagogy materials for beginning students. Her computer died last spring and she seems determined to not replace it. I keep trying to talk her out of this stance and into doing a team blog with me, or a blog of her own (or both!), but so far my powers of persuasion are dim.

We are both former band nerds, at least that's what we called ourselves back in Paris, Texas, where we grew up. Public school band students (and eventually all-state band members): she played clarinet, I played flute. She went on to major in clarinet performance and a few years ago went back to school for her teaching certificate. In her twenties, before motherhood, she played jazz (all the saxophones, flute, clarinet, and the occasional backup vocals) and, through a combination of obstinacy, passion, and talent, broke through the conventional barriers and opened the way for women instrumentalists to join the jazz scene in Houston, Texas (yes, she was the first).

These days, she's a beginning band teacher, working with fifth- and sixth-graders in a public school in Houston, Texas. She's one of the lucky ones, in the professional sense: she's doing her right work.

Her first day of classes this year was Thursday, August 12. She called me early on Saturday morning, the 14th (notice a pattern?), emotionally wrung out. She said that when she was crossing the band room on Friday she had an epiphany and a shift in her grieving over Cobi's death: in an instant she knew she would forever more look at, and treat, each of her students as if s/he were what s/he is: totally precious, totally beautiful, totally deserving of her full attention. Part of this, she said, was a consciousness of her own son's difficulties adjusting to a new school when he was in fifth grade. Part of it, I think, is an act of atonement for the times when she wasn't able to give that total attention and lovingness to him.

Today is four months since Cobi was buried. When my sister told of her transformation experience, she said she knew it would be coming because of her readings of after-suicide literature. But it's too soon, she said. I didn't think it would happen so soon. It's only been four months.

Four months.

The grief is still acute, not perhaps at the surface, but very close. When her school year started I had moments of tears stinging my eyes and a storm in my chest: how could a school year begin without Cobi in it?

A few days ago, deep in papers to be sorted and filed and followed-up on, I came across some Cobi things. Two pages of math problems he did while visiting me the summer after his sixth grade (we did math every day for six weeks). Some papers his mom brought when she visited in June. Photos.

It's time to do something with those things.

I'd say our high school band-nerd days didn't prepare us for the kind of grief we've experienced in the past four months, but that would dishonor how important our band and music experiences were in shaping our lives.

While we were talking this morning, my sister told me of how hard she works to help kids realize their interest in participating in her band program. Many of her students can't afford instruments. Some can't even afford mouth pieces or reeds. She spends a lot of time and heart strategizing about how to get these things for her students. Many of them live in single-parent families, and she knows too well those economics. Many live in two-parent and even multi-generational families whose members work hard, at minimum wages, to keep up with the basics -- there's little extra for things like musical instruments. The State of Texas has a long-time commitment to music in its public schools, and each program has some loaner instruments, but there are never enough for schools where a large percentage of the population lives in poverty.

Does your school have a website? I asked. I thought maybe they'd have a PayPal donate button or something, and surfed over to the Wilson Intermediate site. No PayPal donate button.

Oh, I bet that picture of me looks terrible, she said. Picture? I looked. The faculty link led me to a 404 page.

There should be something there about my program, she said. More searching. Finally, under "Organizations," I find the Band Page, and the photo of my sister and her students. And when I read the caption, I howled.


Flutes? I think not. When I described the picture and read the caption to her, we both laughed like, well, band nerds. Long, deep-bellied, out-of-control, teenager-mortifying laughter. Sisterly laughter. Band-nerd laughter. Medical laughter: deep relief for deep grief.

Band nerds, indeed. Long may we wave.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 10:56 AM.

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