Daisy, Daisy
Give me your answer do
I’m half crazy
All for the love of you…
The small group of us sat huddled in a line, ordered by the notes we each held in our hand – one musical note from each little piece of a deconstructed marimba-like instrument. We were in fifth or sixth grade, and we sat in a side room to the main music room in the basement of McNulty School. The rest of the class continued with their musical studies while the few select students chosen to play ‘A Bicycle Built For Two’ in a mini-concert for the class.
How I absolutely abhorred group activities.
Almost as much as I abhor ice-breaker activities.
Such social anxiety wouldn’t be named or understood until decades later, and by then what did it really matter? Back then was when I needed to know, and I didn’t, but I trudged through, confident in my limited musical skills and well-liked enough to sail through this exercise in corn-dog musicality.
We ran through the song what felt like a bazillion times, and someone always screwed it up. ‘This shouldn’t be so difficult,’ I thought to myself. What I voiced out loud was probably (definitely) more cutting. Social anxiety or not, I had my store of patience, and it wasn’t plentiful. When that was gone, I tended to go brazen and blunt.
Yet I was not immune to the charms of working with a smaller group of people I’d have considered my friends at the time. As difficult as it sometimes was for me, I was also capable of ingratiating wit and charm, even as I cut down others – sometimes precisely because I could so deftly poke fun at others. In other words, I could be a hoot, and people genuinely enjoyed my company, if only to be entertained. It was apparent then that it wasn’t necessarily affection or adoration I could elicit – it was a sense of people waiting to see what I might say or do. There was a certain power in that, and a certain emptiness.
We worked through that silly song, over and over, until we had a pretty good grasp of it. Of course when we performed it for an audience we inevitably fell apart – not horribly, we just weren’t perfect – an early lesson on accepting imperfection, and one that I fought against for the ensuing years, foolishly and regrettably.
Anyway, the daisy will occasionally bring back those memories of grade school, and banding together with my classmates and friends, left briefly on our own to work toward something as a group.
I still prefer to bloom on my own. 
