The Music of Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

remember. My dad used to take us to Yankee games, though. Those are really cool.” This finally lights him up.
    â€œWow,” you lie. “I wish I could have done that.”
    And Eric launches into a breathless description of a Yankee game he recalls in vivid detail, and you give him your undivided attention, ever the accommodating host and gracious ambassador.

    The feelings you have for Miss Kenan probably amount to a crush of some sort; most days, she reminds you of movie magazine starlets, like Sandra Dee or Annette Funicello. Plus, it’s obvious she likes you as much as you like her. You stay after school and help her with classroom maintenance, you dust the erasers against the sidewalk or on the sides of the Dempster Dumpster. You water the plant, you feed the turtle. And Miss Kenan seems to have intuited that you prefer indoor activities to outside ones; she probably realizes how much you dislike the playground. Late one morning, as the other boys are gearing up to play football, she asks you if you would mind staying in from recess to help her put up a new bulletin board.
    â€œI think we’ll do an orange background, with a black crepe paper border, for Halloween,” she muses aloud. It’s just the two of you—alone together in the classroom—which has suddenly become hushed and quiet now that all the other children have gone outside. It is warm too, with the heat from the radiators, turned on now because of the newly brisk fall days.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” you say, and then you add something you heard a Hollywood guest say on The Mike Douglas Show: “I think that will look divine.”
    She smiles at you uncertainly; she holds her gaze for longer than a moment, then looks away again. You offer to cut out jack-o’-lanterns and back-arching, torpedo-tailed cats from orange and black construction paper. While scissoring ever so precisely, your heart begins to beat, and you start to breathe in quick breaths. Is now the time to bombard Miss Kenan with questions about her past? To finally find out all the things you’ve longed to know about? Her rumored days with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey? You want to ask aloud if she wore tight white leotards and smoked and drank with the other circus people in the off-hours, if she dated handsome, but possibly slippery, carny types. You want to know if she ever had her heart broken. But you’re too afraid to ask anything, especially if it might mean finding out that none of it was true at all. You don’t really want to hear the possible cold hard facts about Miss Kenan, about Miss Rosemary Kenan. What if she is nothing more than a nice North Carolina girl from a good middle-income home, raised Methodist, an A student in home economics, an elementary education major at Saint Mary’s College in Raleigh?
    You keep scissoring, pasting, taping, and watching Miss Kenan out of the corner of your eye, wondering …
    But you don’t speak. You decide it’s better to keep pondering the rumors.

    After Halloween, Miss Kenan and the music teacher, Mrs. Curtis, choose you to do a solo song in the December assembly program. You are thrilled and hope that they will ask you to perform “Misty” or “Winchester Cathedral” or “Melancholy Baby,” one of the standards you’ve heard on the Lawrence Welk program. This is it, you decide, your big break, and on the Linden Hills Elementary cafetorium stage you will perform and the children and parents and teachers will whoop and cheer and you will become an Overnight Sensation. You are certain Miss Kenan, with her show business past, probably knows an agent or two, and will arrange for them to be there for your performance.
    The song Miss Kenan and Mrs. Curtis eventually give you to sing is called “Long John,” and it’s a children’s folk tune about a legendary, Paul Bunyan-ish explorer and hunter in the Pacific Northwest. This is