Whistler's Mother

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she learned to whistle. The moment it came to her (far tougher for a kid than “just put your lips together and blow”), she couldn’t stop. She spent her mornings and afternoons practicing, getting punished a few times for not stopping in between. “I’m afraid I’ll lose it,” she would whine about her whistle. She tried to duck down and hide her pucker behind a hand or a desk, make the noise as quietly as possible, but she was caught most of the time.

It’s three years later, and she has not only saved her whistle but honed it. Like my husband, she can whistle everything from pop to classical. Serena’s favorite is the soundtrack from Harry Potter. She doesn’t whistle merely the famous portion, the theme, so to speak; she tackles the background music. She has a memory for that kind of stuff. Today, on the Billy Goat Trail at Great Falls, she whistled something I thought was from Hannah Montana (blech!); I was corrected: “Mom, that’s from Polar Express. You don’t know what’s up.” (Sure I do; it’s a preposition.)

Serena is shy. When she gets up on stage with her class every Christmas or spring for the school musicals, she giggles and smiles a lot, but she eventually overcomes. Her voice is the loudest. She is proud of its smoky depth. I, of course, worry about polyps, but her pediatrician always asks how her blues-singing career is going.

The girl has quite a bit of talent, as far as line and song memorization go. She was only two when she was reciting entire books like Jonathan and the Dragon. I’d hear her humming something unfamiliar and ask its origin, and she would tell me it’s from The Matrix or Homeward Bound. I didn’t even know those movies had music!

We used to do this cute routine whenever she’d be whistling in a public place. I’d turn to her and say, in the same tone used by Jerry Seinfeld to say, “Hello, Newman”: “Whistler!” And she’d reply, like Newman, “Whistler’s Mother!” We don’t do it much anymore, but people still remark about my whistling daughter.

Two weeks ago, Serena asked her teacher if she could accompany the guitar on “The Heavens are Telling” with her whistle. Then, on Wednesday, she whistled during Liturgy—in front of the whole class! It took her a few tries to stop smiling, she admitted, but even the class bully shushed everyone once she got started. And they clapped for her afterward. On the white top after school, two of her classmates ran up to me, excited, asking Serena to repeat her performance because she was so good. She couldn’t stop smiling.


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That’s another of life’s ironies. You only whistle when you’re happy, but you can’t be too happy, or you lose the whistle.

That’s the way life should be, I guess: good enough to keep whistling, but not too good that you can’t. Because on either side of that is nuts.