Barbara Kelly's Reflections on Life - Entry Two

Possibly one of the cruelest ways to punish a vibrant, energetic, full of life child of around twelve years of age is to hold them captive and make them participate in singing lessons. That was the last thing on this beautiful God-given planet that I wanted to do. About the only thing that could make it worse would be if your step-father was the teacher. Well, that was the plight in which I found myself.
My step-father’s name was Mr. Tharp, at least, that what I called him to his face; I won’t mention what I called him to his back. He was a very old man; he was in his sixties when my mother married him and he seemed ancient to me. (I still think Mom married him just because he had an inside toilet). He was an old farmer, very old fashioned, sternly of the old school of mind and very fussy. I think he spent more time agitated with my niece and me than anything else. (Of course, looking back over our lives together, we provided him with plenty of things to be agitated about.) We took for our own personal use just about everything that was his including his tools, his wheel barrow, his mules; nothing was sacred. And most of the time, whatever we took would wind up broken, left out in the rain or some other misfortune would come to it. But the part of him that I hadn’t remembered until recently is that he was a music teacher. My step-father had sat at feet of such men as Virgil Stamps, of the Stamps-Baxter quartet, in singing schools. He had taken the knowledge he gained from singing schools and applied it wherever and whenever he could. He had conducted singing classes in church any time that he was allowed or encouraged to. He enjoyed singing and most of all he enjoyed teaching singing. The problem was, when it came to me, he had a very unwilling student. I remember many days when I sat in our living room singing the scale over and over…do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. I sat there trying to recognize half notes from quarter notes on his chalk board and hoping to guess them correctly so I could escape that much more quickly and get on with my life. I would look out the screen door and my faithful old dog would be looking in, panting and wondering why I wasn’t coming out to play and explore new and exciting things with him and, of course, that made me want to go even more. After multiple looks at the doors or yawns of boredom and slouching down as far as I could in my chair to make it obvious how I felt, Mr. Tharp would finally give up in frustration and tell me to go. I would burst out the door running with my dog, on to the next adventure in the expanse of the many fields that were our farm.
A few days ago, I was called upon to sing at a memorial service for someone in our small community. I have been asked to do such things over the years, but with this one particularly, there was a song that I didn’t know; actually had never heard. The song wasn’t that difficult and I was to sing harmony. A friend helping out with the song, leaned over to me and said, “I’ll just follow your lead!” We engaged in a quiet conversation at that point and I found out that she had always wanted music lessons when she was a child and her family couldn’t afford them. My friend and I are about the same age and the thought struck me, I had within my own house where I lived what she had wanted so desperately as a child and couldn’t have. Yet, I didn’t want to take the time to appreciate it. All I can think now is, “Thank you, Mr. Tharp”.