All is Bright

Every week, Zemma Meacham came to Hillwood Academic Day School, where, without the benefit of sheet music or instruments, she taught music. Hillwood was so small that fifth- through ninth-graders shared a single second-story room in a converted white Victorian at 2525 Scott St., where San Francisco’s prestigious Pacific Heights neighborhood becomes the noticeably less glamorous Cow Hollow. Our wooden desks had holes bored to hold inkwells, and we played basketball on a 3-foot-wide strip of green cement with a netless metal rim at one end. The principal was stern and the education worthy, but the frills were sparse.

Music class was a brief weekly affair in which Mrs. Meacham and her pitch pipe led the voices of 25 students who were unmusical and uninterested. But not for long. When Mrs. Meacham filled the room with her singing voice and the energy of a 6-year-old on Christmas morning, life flowed from her with the whole notes and half notes, elevating our souls.

One year the Pine United Methodist Church called upon the congregation’s youth for a Christmas talent show. I was one of the youthful congregants because my mother, for reasons unclear to me, had decided to take a break from the Presbyterians around the corner. Someone asked what talents we could provide, and up went my little 10-year-old hand.

“I can play the piano,” I said.

There is probably a special penalty for lying in church, although, in my defense, my claim was more a case of overstatement than deceit. For the amount of money my parents had spent on my piano lessons, they could have owned a much nicer car and a houseful of advanced appliances. Instead, after three years and several teachers, I still couldn’t play worth a plink. When my mother figured out I had volunteered to play, she quickly explained to the talent show organizers that they should not count on me to be the accompanist for the entire program, which was their plan. Rather, she suggested, I might be able to play one song.

We settled on Silent Night, and Mrs. Ryder, my weary teacher at the time, tried in earnest to teach me to play it. Despite weeks of instruction on one simple carol, the performance date drew near and I still could not play it, at least not so anyone would recognize it without being told what it was supposed to be.

With just a week to go, my mother’s desperation level rose to the point of creativity, and she called Mrs. Meacham, who seemed to think there was no obstacle at all. On a Saturday morning, my mother and I took the bus across town to Mrs. Meacham’s house for the last-ditch lesson.

Zemma Meacham did not teach me anything at all that day about reading music, or phrasing, or tempo. The only thing she insisted I do was play it loud.

“Don’t be bashful!” she commanded. “Be proud! Play it! Play it so we all can hear it!”

The magic was in her confidence. She never showed a doubt that I could play it, and I believed her. And later that week, wearing a maroon suit from the husky section at the Emporium, I sat on a low bench behind a large, glossy grand piano and played two verses of Silent Night, and I played it so they all could hear it.

Every year now, when I sit in the crowd at St. Luke’s Christmas pageant, I am silently telling every child on the stage: “Be proud! Play it! Play it so we all can hear it!”


December 4, 2013