One of the Brightest Lights

I just learned some news that took my breath away.  My music teacher from elementary school, Darlene J. Sitler, was shot and killed at church.  Her ex-husband was the gunman.  Everything about this is the stuff of nightmares.  It happened in church, with so many other families around.  The church is in a small town, a place that is almost idyllic at its very best.  Things like this just don't happen here.  And Darlene.  Why Darlene?  She was one of the happiest, most patient, most enthusiastic people I have ever known. 

I mean, she'd have to be, teaching elementary school music all these years. 

This world makes no sense on days like this, when you hear news like this.  It's been over twenty years since I moved on from the Children's School, where Darlene taught, but I still think of her as "my" music teacher.  Always have, always will.  And just like anybody does, memory freezes the way a person looks, so in your mind's eye, they never change from the last time you were around them lots.  The thing of it is, the last time I saw Ms. Sitler, Shane and I were at the elementary school, doing dental exams, and Ms. Sitler peeked her head in the room and said 'hello!'  She hadn't changed a bit from the last day I was in sixth grade, in 1990.  How about that!  I would have liked to have more time to visit with her, to catch up, but we had kids' teeth to document, and she had kids' talents to inspire and encourage.

Just this morning, while Zoe and I were down in the gym, cleaning up from my workout, Zoe got fussy, so I started singing her a song Ms. Sitler had taught my class way back in kindergarten ("I like to eat!  I like to eat-eat! I like to eat-eat apples 'n' bananas!"), and Zoe stopped fussing and a big smile broke across her face, and she started dancing.  A few hours later, I saw something on my Facebook feed about a shooting in Coudersport, and then after that, I couldn't stop stalking the story to find out who, and what happened, and when, and where.

I really wish I could rewind back to this morning, when I was singing that song to Zoe that made her stop in her tracks, smile, and dance, when I said "when you go to kindergarten, Ms. Sitler will teach YOU this song!" and have it be true.  I wish we could all wake up from this mess and have it never have happened.

I can't make this make sense, even in my head.  It's not because it's just "too soon."  This doesn't make sense.  I can't and won't package the breathtaking senselessness into some pithy comment.  There are so many things I'd like to say about the ex-husband who shot her, but I didn't know him.

I hate that lives come with a hard-end like this.  I hate it.  But instead of focusing on this hard-end and letting this define Darlene J. Sitler forever in my mind, I want to remember My Music Teacher.

The only way I would have believed that Ms. Sitler was fifty-three is that I remember that I started kindergarten in 1983, and Ms. Sitler was my very first music teacher.  She couldn't have been teaching for very long- '83 could have possibly been her rookie year.  You wouldn't have known it, though.  She greeted my kindergarten class- eighteen boys and six girls- with enthusiasm on our first day of music class.  If I'd have known the word back then, the word I would have used to describe her was "a dynamo!!!" exclamation points intentional. She was this petite woman with big almond-shaped brown eyes, and dark curly hair.  I remember that day she wore a plaid A-line skirt and a blouse with a floppy tied bow (it was 1983), and... high heels!  I remember what Ms. Sitler wore, because I remember thinking "I want to dress just like Ms. Sitler when I grow up!"  After 1983 until I was well into high school, she kept her hair in a pixie cut, which really suited her, and as I was usually a short-hair girl, I remember feeling a lot better about my own pixie-cuts, because Ms. Sitler always looked so stylish with her close-cropped hair.

She made the library/art room/music room at the Harrison Valley Elementary School feel just like home!

Now, music class is neat enough to a kindergartener.  I mean, you just get to go into the music room and sing and clap your hands?!  Awesome sauce!  But then a magical thing happened.  A couple weeks into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler broke out the box of rhythm sticks, followed by the sandpaper blocks, little miniature cymbals, castanets, maracas, the guiro, and.... THE TRIANGLES!!!

Just at Zoe's birthday party a couple months ago, Colleen and I got laughing like idiots, because Colleen and Lorentz got Zoe a set of musical instruments much like those Ms. Sitler brought to my kindergarten class.  In it was a triangle, and I related the story about the day Ms. Sitler brought twenty-four triangles for my kindergarten class, and before she let any of us grab them up in our grubby little mitts, she said "Now, *this* is how you play this musical instrument," and she demonstrated by rapping the metal triangle smartly with the mallet on one of its metal legs, producing a melodious ring.  "You don't just run your mallet around the inside of the triangle like *this*," and she proceeded to ding the mallet around the inside of the triangle the way one would clang a dinnerbell hanging on the ranch porch, which of course was the way all of us kindergarteners had seen triangles used.  Did we promise not to clang the triangles like dinner-bells?  Of course, Ms. Sitler!  We won't clang our triangles like dinner-bells!

She handed out the triangles, all two-dozen of them, and we all waited for her cue to rap our triangles smartly on one of the metal legs to produce a melodious ring.

But almost as though it were on-cue, twenty-four kindergarteners clanged the daylights out of our dinnerbells.  I mean triangles.  I think one little kid who was on his second run-through of Grade K even called out "Come to the table!" while happily clanging his triangle.

Ms. Sitler let us get it out of our systems, the cacophonous clanging, before ensuring that we could, in fact play our triangles the right way!

Halloween was another opportunity for surprise.  The music class day nearest Halloween found us meeting Ms. Sitler in the appointed room, and she had ... an autoharp.  She turned out all the lights in the room and sat down to play us a special song while she strummed the autoharp:

 There was an old woman, all skin and bones
Ooooooo-oooooo-oooo-ooooo
Who lived beside an old graveyard
Oooooooo-woooooooo-ooooo-oooo

The song ends when she opens a door and "BOO!" with just a loud, dischord on the autoharp.  I swear I wet my pants a little at the end of the song, when Ms. Sitler went "Boo!"  Maybe I wasn't the only one.  We ALLLL jumped a little, eighteen boys and six girls.

When our elementary school closed and we headed up to the school on the hill, we learned more things in music class.  Ms. Sitler had hand-drawn and laminated flashcards to teach us how to interpret rhythm (quarter notes and eighth notes) "Ball, Ball, Bas-ket Ball!"  "Chain, Chain, Dai-sy Chain!"  There were other ones, but I don't remember them as well as "Basket Ball" and "Daisy Chain." 

In third grade, we got our first taste of Real Musical Instruments, with music we had to read, when out came the white and red plastic Flutofones.  Now, looking back, the Flutofones are what convince me that Ms. Sitler was one of the most patient people to walk on this planet.  Do you know what a Flutofone sounds like?  At their best, they're kind of reedy and shrill.  Novice third-graders can't play Flutofones at their best.  The noise of them still haunts me.  But Ms. Sitler handled the Flutofone Unit with grace and aplomb, every year, every third grade class. The Intermediate Recorder units exposed about the same level of talent and skill, but with a slightly different tone quality.

For those of us who opted in to elementary band and chorus, elementary band, especially, Ms. Sitler demonstrated an even greater capacity for patience, enthusiasm, and encouragement.  Now, I have no doubt that elementary chorus really DID sound as much like a choir of angelic voices, as much as we imagined we did.  But elementary band... let's be honest.  Elementary band is another matter entirely.  No matter how great a musician the music teacher is herself, no matter how well she teaches her students to play their instruments, no matter how well she inspires them to really practice their 15 minutes a day, there's a level of playing ability that is the threshold.  There's a place that most elementary school musicians get to that is the best they can do for a little while, and even when they reach it, there's a crop of fourth-grade rookies to be contended with.  Elementary school bands have their own sound.  The boom-chuck of the percussion, the very pronounced notes, the larger-than-life slurs.  Accented notes are ACCENTED!!!  Multiple-measure rests are counted out with a tapping foot and not-at-all subtle mouthing "One-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four..."  There's almost always a "cha-cha-cha" stinger on the end of every song.  It's just the way it is, and that's great!

And no matter how awful we'd sound, Ms. Sitler would smile as we were packing up our instruments at the end of band practice and call out "Excellent rehearsal!"  It wasn't disingenuous.  It was encouraging.  Because in elementary school, everybody's talent is embryonic, and you don't snuff out somebody's light before they're even twelve years old.  That's what high school's for!

Another thing about Ms. Sitler that I touched on earlier, was that she was one of the most stylish ladies I knew, especially in elementary school.  Even back when I was in elementary school, Potter County was a casual place to live.  I don't think our school had "jeans Fridays," but instead we had "jeans any day you want to wear 'em" for the teachers.  I don't remember seeing Ms. Sitler in jeans much, if ever.  Dresses and skirts, stylish sweaters, leggings, yes.  She had a knack of being current and up-to-date with her style, so she wouldn't have looked like a hillbilly in other locales besides our school in the cornfield on a hill, without being so cutting-edge that she'd alienate us hillbillies who lived in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers.  I guess when you come right down to it, Ms. Sitler had a very strong sense of style, rather than being swayed by fashion. 

And then there were her SHOES!!! Her shoes were one of the first things I noticed about her, when I was a kindergartener.  Boy, she must have had some shoe collection!  I don't think they were anything like Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos, but it was fun to see which shoes Ms. Sitler wore, any given day.  I remember being really irritated with my mom one day in sixth grade, for making me wear my snow boots to school, and bring my regular-shoes to change into (they took up valuable space in my backpack, and I was horsing home every school book as well as a French horn!), and when I went to the music room for band practice, I saw tucked under Ms. Sitler's desk a pair of black snowboots with faux-fur peeking out of the tops!  Ms. Sitler wore snowboots to school then changed into her cute shoes!  Well, then.  If Ms. Sitler could wear snowboots to school, I didn't need to feel like a dork when I did! 

When I got to high school, whenever I'd buy new shoes (a lot of my allowance money went to buy cheap shoes back then), I'd always run a prospective pair through a "Ms. Sitler Test."  Would Ms. Sitler wear these shoes, if she were a high schooler?  Yes?  Well, okay!  Ring me up a pair in each color!  One day when my sister was still in elementary school, and I was in eighth or ninth grade, I'd slogged up to the elementary school from the high school, on a sloppy, wet, nasty day, for Girl Scouts or some such nonsense, and as I trudged through the front doors of the school, Ms. Sitler was on her way out for the night. She stopped in her tracks and said in her characteristic enthusiastic voice, "I LOVE those boots!" and then continued on her way out to the parking lot while I had trouble getting my big head through the school doors, swollen up by a compliment from MY style icon!  They were neat boots.  They were blue rubber boots, and they were technically my mom's.  I hijacked them that morning, and after Ms. Sitler said she LOVED them, my mom had a hard time getting them back from me!

It's going to take a long time to come to terms with losing Ms. Sitler the way we did.  Our school and our community is never going to be the same.  For such a petite, pixie-like woman, she's leaving a huge, open void behind.  She was a dynamo.  She was beloved.  She was so much bigger than how her life's book of Revelation was written.  Thousands of kids who grew up to be adults will teach their kids the songs Ms. Sitler used to sing.  Thousands of adults who were kids who'd pee themselves a little bit when Ms. Sitler would get to the end of "There Was an Old Woman All Skin and Bones" will sing that song to THEIR kids, with or without an autoharp.  (WITH the autoharp is much better, I'm sure!)  Ms. Sitler encouraged THOUSANDS of us to follow our dreams, to practice for fifteen minutes every day, not to get discouraged if, after counting out all the beats in a multi-measure rest, you forgot to make your big re-entrance in the song.

THOUSANDS of us are better for having had Darlene Sitler in our lives during elementary school.  She was one of the brightest lights, and now we all have a little of that light in us, too.  I think the best way we can honor Our Music Teacher is not to let the awful ending to her story define her, but instead remember all the ways she touched our lives.  And if we can, encourage each other to be our best.  Teach our kids her songs.  ENCOURAGE kids.  Tell people just what they mean to you, before they're gone. Fan up the little bit of her light that's in us all until all the darkness is gone, until every corner is lit.

Ms. Sitler, I will NEVER forget you.  I wish YOU were here to teach Zoe your songs, but I'll teach them to her the best I can.  I'll scare the bejeebers out of her at Halloween with the "Skin and Bones" song, and sing "Turkey trot-trot-trot, across the lot-lot-lot" with her at Thanksgiving.  Maybe someday, she'll be like us and play the French horn, although I think she's a percussionist at heart.  She loves to play the dinnerbell.  I mean triangle.  But I'll teach her the right way, someday.  Maybe if you get a minute while you're Up There, you could take a listen.  We'll be listening for glimpses of you!

Love,
April W.