At five minutes before six this afternoon, my mom hollered at my to change my clothes and get ready for my carpool to arrive.
I knew about the clothes part, I just didn’t know about the carpool.
“What carpool?” I asked my mom as I came downstairs.
“The one I arranged for you.” She said simply, leaving me with a whole bunch of clothes. When I put on my black pants and white shirt (which felt awkward), I went outside. A moment later, a sleek car pulled up.
A friendly man greeted me and invited me in. The whole way to the place where we went, he was either talking to me or his daughter, or on the phone.
When we finally got to the choir rehearsing place (a church) and got out of the car, the teacher told us to “please get in the carpool line” that was like 12 cars long. We weren’t allowed to park.
So when we finally finally got into a church we were practicing in, a man was guiding us to sing the word “cat” in a musical form.
“Okay, so this is what you have to do,” he told us. “You sing like this: cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat. Get it?”
Yes, I did. We sang it up the chord and down the chord. Then he told us to do the same thing with “duh”, “la”, and a bunch of other words.
When the actual plump music teacher arrived, she explained that that man was her husband. That husband sat to the side grasping a bunch of papers while watching eagerly.
We began our practice by singing a song. It climbed up octaves and went down chords.
To demonstrate, she sang it for us. Her voice stunned me, with it’s climbing and precise control. For example, at a part where you are supposed to do it very precise, the teacher went through it so that you could hear every single note as if they were separated.
The rest of us, however, when together, kind of sluuuurrrredd it a bit. The teacher made a humongous deal out the clarity of those notes that added up to maybe one-fourth of a second.
“Now, you need to sing ‘la. la. la.’ instead of ‘laa-laa-laa’. Okay?”
Okay…
At the end of the lesson (which came quicker than I expected, I might say), we went outside to wait for the carpool to arrive. They drove me to my house, and I waved.
My parents weren’t home, I realized as I heard them call from the street. They were going on a little walk.
I joined them and they asked me a few questions that parents always ask: How was it? Did you like it? What happened? etc.
When I walked into my home, I put up my new music bag that had “Houston Children’s Chorus” imprinted on it thought to myself, I can’t wait until next time.