Numbers.

Seventy-four eleven-year-olds gather in the gym thirty minutes before dismissal. The concert will begin four days, eighteen hours and thiry minutes from now. The audience will be comprised of approximately one hundred fifty parents, three hundred twenty-five children and forty teachers and teaching assistants.
We practice going on and off the stage at the far end of the gym three times. Thank heaven they remember something from the January concert; the rehearsal for that performance (I recall with a shudder) had bordered on the zoological.
Earlier in the day I played the Washington Post March for forty seven-year-olds, though not all at once. The recording dates back to 1890, one hundred seventeen years ago. One of the punkins innocently asks if I was alive back then. I draw a timeline, tick off the decades and draw a line from 1854 to 1932, John Philip Sousa's birth and death dates. Another one from 1959 to the present, so they can see, ancient as I am, I was never alive at the same time as Sousa. I put a mark for 1920, and tell them about my eighty-seven-year-old father, whose life does overlap Sousa's. Then a little dash at the end from 2000. "That's YOU!" They giggle.
An odd thought occurs. None of these children have any recollection of 9/11. It hardly seems like that much time could have passed. Yet the rug in front of me holds indisputable, albeit very wiggily, evidence that several years have indeed elapsed.
There are ten school days left. I will need to write four hundred comments on individual music learning, direct three more concerts, commute two hundred miles to school and back.
I hope in the rush I remember to savor all the numbers, to enjoy them as they come, that I don't miss them in the blur of end-of-year activity.