Feed My Lambs

Feed My Lambs

Tend My Sheep

I have a hard time remembering what I went to the pantry for or who that actor in that thing was, but I can recall, with precision, the lyrics and tune of the song I had to sing for 7^th grade choir placement.

“Feed My Lambs/

Tend My sheep/

Over all a vigil keep/

In my name, lead them forth/

Gently/

Gently/

as a loving shepherd of the Lord.”

Even now, as I type the word “Gently”, I arch my eyebrows, trying to reach that high note. That must have been over 40 years ago now.

After not seeing my name on the celebrated roster for 7^th grade Volleyball, I found myself with a new schedule. In the place of the class with the cool girls, I was relegated to choir. Choir. Jesus H Christ. Would I have to wear a robe? I sulked my way to the choral room, situated behind the snack bar tantalizingly close to the main exit. I could make a break for it. Walk to 7/11. Maybe hitch a ride out West where I could learn how to make Navajo baskets and rosary beads. I made a mental note to bring this thought up at my next confession.

I recall walking into the large room and being handed a folder by a terribly loud woman with short black hair standing at attention. She had lots of eye makeup on and wore bright red lipstick. She wore a black caftan situation that went all the way to her knees and swayed with her movements as she shook our hands, gave us our “books” and rang out in her somehow musical sounding voice, “Stand anywhere you’d like, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be starting with our placements in just a moment!”

It should have been mass chaos: chairs precariously perched atop a set of bleachers, a big piano placed right in the center where we could actually touch it, a large mixed gender assembly of 12 year olds, stiff folders just perfect for slapping, and no seating chart. But by some miracle, it wasn’t. We all just kind of walked up the bleachers, grabbed a seat and faced the piano.

“Welcome! Welcome! Choir!” she rang out after the last student crossed the threshold. “My name is Nancy Kissinger and YOU are MY new 7^th grade Choir. I’m delighted to have you. Now. We have lots to do and very little time to do it. Open your folders and let’s warm up!”

She played a short little melody on the piano and asked us to repeat it. Then she added some words. We repeated. After a few times through, she told us, as if this was a perfectly normal expectation, that she would call us out of the room, one by one, and have us sing this song to her while the rest of us waited in the classroom. We exchanged glances as she gathered her things, walked out into the hallway and called for the first student. I don’t know what was more shocking, the fact that she was expecting us to not devolve into The Lord of the Flies or the fact that we didn’t.

We sat in awkward silence for what seemed like ages until Larry Brishkie made a fart noise into his elbow and the room exhaled into comfortable laughter. By the time she called for me, everyone in the room was casually chatting as if we weren’t being called to our doom. These rubes. Didn’t they know we were being asked TO SING?? BY OURSELVES?!? IN FRONT OF AN ADULT LADY?!?

I heard her call my name, “Jennifer? Jennifer Faulk”?

I lurched at the sound and clutched the book, digging small half-moon indentions into it. I almost vomited right then and there as I missed the step down and rattled the bleachers, ne’ “risers”, I was later to be told.

In the hallway, Miss Kissinger was scribbling something in her roster. I stood before her, wanting nothing more than for this entire day to be over. She looked up over her glasses which come to think of it were always on her nose and said, “Jennifer, is it? What do you like to be called?”

I think I just stood there in absolute silence with my mouth open because she had to repeat it twice. No one. I repeat NO. ONE. In my life had ever asked me that question before. I honestly didn’t have a folder in my mind to hold this new information. An adult. Asking me. What I wanted.

I hated “Jennifer” mainly because I only heard it spoken by adults and I always, always felt like I was in trouble when they said it. Let’s not get into the fact that I never, ever got into trouble. Just the possibility that I had done something with the potential to disappoint an adult was enough to send a wave of nausea into my core.

My family normally called me Jen. When they were in a particularly genial mood, it might be Jen-JEN. I do recall a short stint of my dad calling me “Lou-Lou Bug”. I loved and hated that at the same time. None of those felt right at school or with friends. I longed for something that sounded like I wanted to feel: confident, pretty, cool, older, like everyone else.

Something welled up within me and I blurted out to Miss Kissinger something I had only recently thought inside my own head, “Jenny. I would like to be called Jenny.”

“Then Jenny it is. Now, Jenny, let me hear your beautiful voice.”

I know even as I write it. It sounds like a small thing. But hearing Miss Kissinger say that name felt like I was home for the first time in my little, weird body. It may have been the first time I realized that I was an actual separate entity from my family capable of having my own desires and activities. And something about Nancy Kissinger actually asking me what I wanted and then looking me dead in the eye like I was a real, honest to goodness person and respecting my wishes, made me love her forever.

As I sang the line from “Feed My Lambs” to her, Miss K, as we would soon come to call her, closed her eyes, tilted her head with a smile, and acted like my voice was lifting her up to the very heavens above. All of my nerves left my body with my song and I felt…warm. She waited a beat after I finished before opening her eyes and marking “Alto” in her book. She paused and thanked me as if I had given her something valuable. Then she called for the next student.

Memory is strange, isn’t it?

When I try to imagine who I stood next to or what we did every day in that class, not much comes to mind. I see snippets of sheet music, a giant Hershey Kiss we all chipped in to buy Miss K for Christmas one year, and the weird tooth marks it already had in it by the time we gave it to her.

Over the next two years, Miss K taught me how to listen to those around me, how to project just loud enough not to stand out, how to OHpen my MOWth with vOWles, how to sounDuh ouT my ConsonanTS, how to breathe, when to breathe, and how to appreciate what kind of voice you had. She tried to teach me confidence and self-belief, but while she was angelic to everyone who knew her, the woman wasn’t a magician.

To this day, when I watch a choir, I get a little jealous of the shared looks between them and their director, as they transition between pieces. There was something so wonderful about finally getting a portion of a difficult piece down and seeing her arched eyebrows as we approached it and then her easy smile once we did. That was better than any award or gold star she could have given us.

I’m not sure why I didn’t continue with singing into high school. I think in some way, I felt like moving on to high school choir was abandoning Miss K. I couldn’t imagine following anyone else’s direction. In reality, it was abandoning a part of myself that I wouldn’t pick up again for another four decades. And like most things, I had to pick it up gently. Gently. Ever so gently.