My daughter was in fifth grade. The last year of elementary
school, and the first year of band. She was learning to play the baritone – an
instrument choice that baffles me to this day; it doesn’t carry the melody, baritones
are placed way in the back of the stage, and it was huge, a case as big as my
skinny little girl, and we had to buy a wheeled luggage cart for her to carry
it back and forth to school.
So it’s
fifth grade, springtime, and the final band concert of the year. I’m sure it
started at 7 p.m., all school events do, and we parents sauntered into the
school multi-purpose room and arrayed ourselves on the folding chairs facing
the stage. It wasn’t the first concert, so nobody was too concerned about being
on time. And we were all dressed in our standard post-workday attire: dads in
khakis and polos, moms in dark-wash jeans.
Until the
beginning of the second number. A new dad rushed in, worriedly late. Wearing a
dirty baseball cap, torn canvas jacket, and paint-stained work pants, the
Latino planted himself firmly in the aisle between the two sections of folding
chairs. Deliberately he set a shopping bag at his feet, reached in and pulled
out a shiny silver videocamera. He turned it on and trained it a dark-haired
girl earnestly playing her clarinet. From my seat I watched his viewscreen, and
he zoomed in and never strayed from what was obviously his daughter.
As the
parents jostled and jiggled impatiently around him, the day-laborer dad never
moved. He taped every remaining minute of the performance, never sitting, never
shifting, never slouching. When finally the kids ended – did they play five,
six numbers? I don’t recall, it was an unexceptional concert – he carefully
turned off and put down his camera and, beaming, clapped and clapped.
His
daughter saw him, looked down, bit her lip, and once she stepped down off the stage
she rushed into her father’s arms.
