I hope you don't mind

I’ve heard a lot of good music lately. A lot. Tonight’s concert was beautiful in a different kind of way. Junior-highschoolers are adorable. And so stupid. And so really beautiful, in such a different kind of way.

First came the seventh graders. Like idiot lambs with crap-stained tails, waiting to be herded onto the risers, glass-eyed, then on their way off the stage bunching up at the stairs confused. Voices, all of them, trying to find wings, aiming for confidence and beauty but the girls coming in a half-pitch too low and the boys an octave too high. Some kids with arms rigid at their sides, other kids trying to stay still but dammit-just-can’t-help-but-feel-the-music.

Then the eighth graders, nearly twice as big as they were as seventh graders. At least a couple of them must’ve woken up this morning and discovered they’d grown an inch overnight and now they stand there, not really sure how to manage that extra inch of bone and muscle and tendon. But all that extra space gives their voices some space to resonate, to find the pitch, to project out into the world. Last year these were merely the sons and daughters of their mothers.

And by the time the ninth-graders come on, something’s happened. They arrive on stage, with a type of assurance and comfort with one another, confident enough now not just to be in their own space but also in one another’s space, not merely waiting to be herded but now helping Sue with the stage equipment. Personalities emerging—some cocky, some still elbows-and-angles, some with a quietness that isn’t just a shy incapacity to express one’s own personality.

So much potential. It’s a bit frightening, really, and sad to think. How many will make it on to college? Or to a good trade job, or to their own path to success? And how many will make it on to prison, or to the Loaf N Jug, or to some limited version of what they could’ve been? One girl there looks so natural in the bright red, short-sleeve, knit polo shirt that is the official uniform of the junior high band. Will she graduate on to the green knit polo at Subway? Maybe the blue knit polo at Best Buy? Or is there something more for her?

I hope there’s something more for all of them. One of the songs they sang tonight was Elton John’s “Your Song": I hope you don't mind that I put down in words how wonderful life is while you're in the world. I hope those students, all of them, find a way to make their lives wonderful.