Music teacher

Photo: Eramosa River, yesterday.

~~~~~~~~~~

My music teacher from grade four to eight was a cranky lady named Anna Grayson. She looked like a Jim Unger character with a high, white bufont and heavy glasses. I wanted to learn how to play the flute, but it didn't work out in grade four; my arms were too short and the flourescent lights in the music room made me dizzy.

Mrs. Grayson was easily the oldest teacher in our school. She must have been at least 50. She would not tolerate silliness in her music classes. The games we played there seemed devised for kindergarten children. Behind her back we called her the Old Bag.

The following year I skipped into grade 6, and I tried to play the flute again. But I still had trouble reaching the end of it, and those lights, combined with blowing so hard, gave me headaches. Mrs. Grayson was impatient and dismissive. My mother came to school one day to see what could be done about the problem. Then the old lady took an interest in me.

It turned out my parents had heard of Mrs. Grayson. When Mom and Dad were high school students in Windsor, some of their classmates took violin lessons from her. Her parents had been immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Mrs. Grayson encouraged me to try clarinet. It would be a little easier than flute, and it was supposed to be a good woodwind to learn, from which all the others would follow: oboe, flute, saxaphone. So it was decided. Clarinet became my instrument.

Harrow District Elementary Senior School didn't just have a band; it had an orchestra. Somehow Mrs. Grayson had got ahold of a number of violins. We must have made a terrible screech. I well remember her tirades if anyone hadn't practiced enough. I had a natural musical ability, and never incurred her wrath. Once while reproving the second trumpets, she gesticulated madly and the baton went sailing out of her hand, clear across the orchestra. Around the halls of the school, word spread that the baton had caught her wig and sent it flying, too, but that was only a rumour.

While I was growing up, my parents always took me to see performances by the Windsor Symphony, and Windsor Light Opera. That is how I came to love Classical music. Mrs. Grayson played violin in both orchestras. Then she was always dressed in black.

Mrs. Grayson helped my parents pick out a clarinet, the gift I received on graduation from grade 8. I still have that clarinet; it is in need of serious repair and has hardly been played since I finished high school.

One day Mrs. Grayson invited my parents and I to drop by her house for dessert after a Windsor Symphony concert. I expected an ascetic home and flavourless food. It turned out that her husband was a jeweller, and the Graysons lived in a large Victorian house, lavishly decorated. I remember heaps of red velvet, and plush wallpaper. The homemade desserts were decadent. In the midst of pleasure, I glanced up to see Mrs. Grayson with a dessert fork halfway to her mouth, watching me indulgenty. Then she smiled, and her smile was fabulous.

Mrs. Grayson never had children. Music had been her vocation, and she had taken it seriously. Her husband dropped dead in an alleyway a year or two later while carrying a money bag to the bank. He wasn't robbed. Mrs. Grayson continued teaching for several more years. We attended her retirement party a year after I started high school.

At Thanksgiving I asked Mom whether she had heard of Mrs. Grayson, and apparently she is still alive and active in Windsor's music community. I'm glad to hear it. Most of my classmates probably remember the Old Bag, but I remember an eccentric lady who loved music more than anything, and helped pass some of that love to me.

( Photo: the school orchestra )