The Box Conductor

Devin Smith put down his book and looked at the digital clock sitting next to the toaster on his kitchen counter. There was a slight glare from the afternoon sun shining through his small window but he was still able to make out the red numbers that flashed 3:30pm. He had half an hour to prepare before his student would hopefully show up. Devin hated teaching beginners, but to make ends meet he had conformed to enduring a subtle boredom and frustration for the 45 minutes until the clock would flash 4.45pm. Feeling overwhelmed by the idea of having to play chords to accompany the child as he fumbled through “Mary had a little lamb” again, he leaned back in his chair and looked over at the piano. ‘Maybe if I teach “Mary had a little lamb” enough times I could buy a new piano’, he thought to himself. He started trying to calculate how many times it would take playing through the annoying tune before he could save up enough money, but the very notion of the repeated melody haunting the next few years of his life began to torment him, and he quickly abandoned the thought. What really bothered him was that half the time, the kids didn’t even want to learn the stupid song. A large number of his students just came because their parents forced them to and when they would fake sick, the parents wouldn’t even bother calling to let him know. So he would sit in his kitchen drinking instant coffee, leaning back in his chair; trying to anticipate the sound of his doorbell, or the tri-tone of doom as he had come to think of it.

It wasn’t always such an exercise in futility. There were those rare times when he could feel the joy leaking out of his pupil with an unabashed excitement, when for a few brief instants the students’ eyes would light up, and the emotion would be expressed in sound; that, that made a million Mary had a little lambs worth it. Devin looked at the dust collecting on the legs of his old piano and remembered the first time he had felt that same sentiment. He closed his eyes and pictured himself as a five-year-old boy running through his grandparents’ apartment. His grandfather picked him up and placed him on top of a cardboard box in front of their old black-and-white television. He handed Devin a plastic knife and then went over to the tele and pressed play on the VCR. His grandfather didn’t say anything, he was mostly a silent type, but just watched as the boy was absorbed in the images of the symphony concert he had recorded a few nights before. Devin stood on that cardboard box directing Mozart’s second opera with various forms of plastic cutlery for hours until his parents dragged him away kicking and screaming.

The next week Devin went back to his grandparents and this time, his grandfather let him wear one of his fancy suits. Devin remembered feeling so important standing on that box in the oversized suit. He would push up the sleeves as the orchestra tuned and they would fall right back down when Devin took his dramatic bow before putting his arms up to prepare to passionately flail them at the television. At first it may have been the theatrics of the game that he enjoyed, but after a while Devin started to feel he was physically becoming a part of the sound. He would pick out his favorite concerts and ask his grandfather to put them on repeatedly. Mozart and Beethoven were his favorites but in those days he just called the songs by the numbers that his grandfather had labeled the tapes with. He remembered running into their living room yelling: “Number three! Number three!” After his grandfather passed away Devin had often spent time wondering which one number three had been. He had tried to recover the tapes, but his grandmother had thrown them out after her husband’s death. She said his ghost walked around the apartment at night and that she would try to ask him what was on tape number three, but she never found out and Devin had tried to stop encouraging her delusions years ago. Maybe it was better not to know.


G. C#. G. Devin opened his eyes. He stood up, opened the door and looked down at the little boy beaming up at him. “Come in” Devin said to him. The little boy came in and stood awkwardly with a couple sheets of music in his hand. Devin closed the door. He went in to the kitchen to put his cup of coffee in the sink. He looked at the spoon leaning against the side of the cup. He left the cup on the table and went over to the silverware drawer and took out a clean spoon. He brought the spoon and the chair he had been leaning in before his student had arrived into the living room, and as he walked over to the record player to put on Beethoven’s 5th symphony he looked at the boy and said: “I think we’re going to try something a little different today.”