The first day of eighth grade and I’m excited to get to my elective class, Choir. I’ve never had instruction in singing. I know I’m good. People tell me so when they hear me belt Take Me Out to the Ball Game and the harmony part of Happy Birthday.

My mother is a music lover. Opera, musicals, Perry Como. But I’ve never heard her sing. No lullabies, no children’s songs, no singing along with the radio. No Take Me Out to the Ballgame or even the Star-Spangled Banner. She never even hums. Never says “that’s my favorite song,” or even “I like that song.” It will be decades before I think to wonder why.

Dad’s a music lover too, and unabashedly the most tone-deaf person ever. “I can hear it but I can’t replicate it,” he says with a cheerful shrug. He can’t carry a tune in a dump truck, embarrassingly so to his children. It will be decades before we realize that his fingernail-on-the-blackboard shrieking “Go-o-o-o-oldfing-ah!” in the shower was for our, er, benefit. But what a guy; he good-naturedly opened himself to laughter by performing in a small community musical. As the bad guy, of course.

Last year I sat next to a friend of my parents at a memorial service. After the singing of a hymn, she whispered to me, “You have a great singing voice. We either have it or we don’t. You have it. I don’t. I used to sing to my children when I put them to bed. My son told me years later he would pretend to be asleep so I would stop singing.”

Now, finally, I’ll be the first in my family to sing well. A songbird. A diva! I take my seat in the music room. The teacher opens her roll book.  Abbott, Anderson, Arnett, Barry . . . . When she calls and mispronounces my name, Berenstine, I reply amiably, "That's me, but it's pronounced Berensteen." Without pausing or looking up, she says, "You pronounce it wrong."

Without pausing or looking back, I stride from the room, straight to the office. The principal looks on wordlessly while I tell the secretary I won’t be able to get along with this teacher and need to be transferred to another elective immediately. They do it without question. They don’t seem surprised. The secretary hands me a class change slip.

My singing career is over in a blink. I won’t be the next Linda Ronstadt.

I take my class-change slip down the hall and present to the school newspaper teacher-adviser. Looks like I’ll be learning to write.

Turns out there’s more than one way to find my voice.

Thanks, Mrs. Name Longforgotten. Did I pronounce that right?