I write this late Saturday evening. The
pleasant day with the two granddaughters and our daughter was not as pleasant
as it could have been. My manipulative older granddaughter made sure of that.
She may have created a conflict so she could leave, skip dinner and our family
film to go where she really wanted to go, a date with a friend. Her mother
knows her daughter too well and can see under all the subterfuge but my wife
who believes in the innocence and goodness of most people cannot.
We managed and the four of us watched
Inspector Morse in an episode called Dead on Time. I would not reveal too much
of the plot except to say that one of the protagonists, a possible murder
suspect at one time was a most dear girlfriend to Morse in his young Oxford
days. There is a scene where Morse, the older Morse takes her to a concert that
features Franz Schubert’s exquisite Quintet in C, D. 956. In a latter part
Morse invites the woman to his flat and as he prepares all the food he has the
Schubert on his sound system.
As I took Hilary and Lauren home I played
the Quintet in the car’s sound system. And I told them a short story.
When I was in quinto grado in my school (a
bi-lingual American school in Buenos
Aires) our teacher read a biography of Schubert in
Spanish. She read for 15 minutes every day at the end of the class. I have no
memory of my teacher’s (she was a woman) name nor do I remember her features. I
remember a droning voice with a clipped Argentine accent that began always
thusly, “De la biografía de Franz Schubert, capítulo segundo (o tercero o
cuarto)… and she would read to us.
I had no idea who this Franz Schubert was
except to vaguely remember he had to do with a city in Austria called Vienna.
And yet, today, September 7, 2013 as I was
driving my family home it occurred to me that my anonymous teacher taught me
well.