A Sideways Way of Teaching

...not exactly mendacious.

We were taught to sing an old song ... for a hidden reason ... for several hidden reasons....

Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes
Flow gently I'll sing thee a song to thy praise.
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream
Flow gently sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

I didn't know at that time -- I was maybe 10 or 11 -- what a love song was, but I somehow knew that this song was not a meaningless string of words. I suspect my classmates knew it, too. We were told that the words were written by a famous Scotsman, a poet, who had the same first name as one of my best friends. Perhaps we got our first clue about the song's importance from the word our teacher used to describe the poet: We understood fame.

We didn't understand love, or why a man would write a love song. Oh, I knew already about how love feels. I was deeply -- and silently -- in love with Gloria Brown, but I didn't have a name for what I felt. I just had the passion without the poetry.

When we finally mastered the melody, it seemed everyday after that, when the time came for music lessons, someone in the class would suggest that we sing Flow Gently Sweet Afton. Apparently I wasn't the only one who had found in that melody a sound to match his or her feeling. At that stage of our lives, we must all have been experiencing, for the first time, the strangeness of love.

The people who put together the fifth grade curriculum probably gave us that song to sing for the very purpose of letting us know that love was not something to be ashamed of, that even a famous poet had been in love. I'm not sure the lesson took. I don't recall that my classmates and I were suddenly transformed into troubadours pleading our love in song and word. The outward expressions came a few years later. So did our realization of the other lessons hidden in Robert Burns's poem. We could never have known at 10 or 11 how it is that love and death both get the deepest part of their meaning from each other. We did not understand the depth of Burns's love because we did not truly understand that Mary was dead.

I still have a hard time believing that our teachers sought to teach us that complex lesson. But on good days, when I'm able to break through the barriers of disillusionment raised by the realities of war and deceit, I can manage to imagine that our teachers, whether they intended it or not, were teaching us a lesson they already knew. For after all, our teachers were older. Listening to the beautiful sound we made with our unchanged voices, they must have heard in their own hearts the reverent pathos Burns had written. They knew of death. They knew of their own childhood loves. They knew, as we all know now, the painful contradiction of life's ending and love's permanence.

Oh, we were probably supposed to ask, "What's a brae?" and to wonder whether Mary would someday awaken from her dream. But the lady sitting there at the head of the class, moving her hands as if to conduct us as a choir, would have heard in our voices a more plaintive cry. All the teachers who have listened with their adult hearts to the gently flowing voices of childhood, would -- when their souls were awake -- have heard not simply the beginning of love as a sounded passion, but the unending joy of their first, last and always loves, and the knell of the certain end of life -- the murmuring harmony of passion and fear.

And those of my classmates who still exist must feel something of what this one feels ... abiding lessons, perhaps never meant to be taught, and yet, never forgotten.