Learning from the bottom of the class at the age of old dog, new tricks

It's totally okay to compete with my nephew

Remember how school was a pleasure and a privilege, but also yuck? Sitting for hours, scary people, routine, homework, cruel timings. It’s true that many little kids are early risers, so drop-kicking them into school at dawn is better than having them jump up and down on your face for an hour. Teenagers, however, need more sleep than almost any other kind of living creature. Yet on schooldays they are traumatised into consciousness by their insomniac mother smiting the curtains aside like gravel raining on tin, while howling that you’re late. 

I’m told that some mothers would have bent over my vulnerable sleeping form, stroked my hair and whispered, ‘Sweet blossom, I know how much this violates your human rights, but one day you will be a freelancer who can sleep in everyday, though eventually you’ll get too old to sleep in, which will be totally unfair.’ I want a refund.

It’s not that I had a bad time in class. Young brains are like sponges, and paying attention came naturally to me, so except for that time when I pooped in my kindergarten classroom chair, my school career was fairly smooth. Still, it was thrilling to be done with it. Never again, I crowed, never again.
 

That’s just waving a red flag in karma’s face. 

So here I am back in school, in the sense of trying to learn music theory. It’s a whole new beast, a unique species of language with a different script, different subtleties, and more rules than a colonial bureaucracy. At my current age of old dog, new trick, my problems are also different: despite plenty of sleep, I’ve become the dullard with the attention problem. 

Music theory workbooks lull you into a false sense of security (‘Write over the dotted lines to make treble clefs’), and then start beating you all over the brain with scales and time signatures and accidentals and whatnot. My teacher said I should do the work in pencil in order to correct mistakes. 

I don’t own a pencil, I said.

Justified, he said, glancing at my grey hair. But you need to get one.  

These were uncharted waters. Where did pencils grow? Were they shy? How does one care for them? I was relieved to find some at my corner shack, along with eggs and potato chips, at no cost to my booze budget. Now I’m equipped, as well as assured of the proper nutrition a student needs.

These mornings, therefore, I am to be found labouring at the workbooks, bearing down on my pencil with my tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth. I feel mighty pleased after completing a line—music is so pretty!—until my eyes refocus. Musical markings must be written very precisely, for legibility, and mine look as if they’ve been doodled in urine by a roadside drunk. Sorrow and free association leads me to wonder whether it’s time for sundowners yet, which makes me amuse myself drawing notes in the style of Dali’s melting clocks, draped over the stave like laundry, or hanging by the stem but rearing up at the last minute. It takes effort to put a leash on myself and return to figuring out what goes where and why, to the sound of actual creaking coming from my brain.

My teacher had me photocopy the workbooks first, because he needed to pass them on to another student—my 10-year-old nephew. This revelation has triggered a brand new competitiveness in me: I’m determined to apply myself if only to make sure the little rugrat doesn’t best me. And don’t lecture me about picking on someone my own size. In this case, I am very clearly the underdog.