“Where are you going?” Sherry asked. “There’s still another half hour.”
“I’m going to one of the music practice rooms. I want to see if I can put together some music.”
I could feel the heat on my back as a bunch of female eyes watched me leave.
Mr. Proilet looked up from his desk as I walked into the music room. I simply smiled at him as I walked to one of the practice rooms and shut the door behind me. I started to play, from memory, the piano intro to the song that had been playing in my head for a day or so now.
I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I barely heard the bell signifying the end of the period. I had music sheets everywhere all over the room.
“Shit!” I said, grabbing all of the sheets and trying to get them in some semblance of order.
It was only after I got out of the practice room and saw the familiar people in the music room that I realized that my next period was Music Theory… I was already in the room that I needed to be in!
My teacher smiled at me and saw the stack of papers that were in my hand. “Getting a head start on classwork?”
“Um…” I looked sheepishly at the scores in my hand. “Yeah… I guess. I lost track of the time…”
Most of the room laughed at me, including my teacher.
Mr. Proilet nodded toward the practice room. “You can go back to what you were doing, Jim. I’ll have somebody let you know when there’s about five minutes before the bell. All right?”
“Um… thanks…”
I went back to the practice room and continued scoring and doodling on the piano. I made a mental note to talk with the Swifts—preferably Charlie—later this evening.
At the end of U.S. history, my last class of the day, I watched Sherry and the other students walk out of the room. I was about to go when I remembered a question that I wanted to ask my teacher.
“Mr. Stiles, do you have a few minutes to talk about something?”
The teacher looked at me and smiled. “Sure, Jim. What’s on your mind?”
“I have a general question about history and wondered if you could help me.”
Mr. Stiles raised his eyebrows and said, “Hmm. What’s the question?”
“Actually, there are a couple of questions. First, have you ever heard the expression, ‘With great power comes great responsibility?’” I recalled hearing Sherry use that expression the other day.
The teacher smiled. “Ah, Spiderman and the eternal loneliness of the super hero.”
Ah, yes! That’s where I heard it. I nodded to the teacher and decided to take an alternate track. “We’ve all heard the expression, ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.’ Does history really bear this out?”
My history teacher looked at me a bit strangely. “Hitler had absolute power.”
I was ready for that particular example. After all, I’ve spent many sleepless nights considering the power of the tickets and the repercussions of them. “It can be argued that Hitler was corrupted before he came to power. He wrote ‘Mein Kampf’ when he was in prison.”
This impressed my teacher. “You have a good point there. Why are you asking these questions?”
“I was wondering if the expression is true. I mean, what if you had absolute power, but knew the expression and tried to avoid corruption?”
“Your question sounds like one that you’d hear in an intro philosophy course in college.”
I smiled. “I took some college courses, but not philosophy.”
“Ah, yes,” Mr. Stiles said, smiling. “Jean Proilet and his music courses.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say next.
My teacher looked at me thoughtfully. “I think history shows us that Peter Parker’s dilemma does bear out. For instance, we have Leonid Brezhnev and President Ford as the world leaders with the most power. Each one has to walk on eggshells to avoid insulting the other too much. At the same time, they both have to appear strong to their constituencies, but not scare the rest of the world into thinking that another world war is about to erupt.”
“I never thought about it like that.”
“How familiar are you with the British?”
“Huh?” I asked, a bit surprised by the question. “You mean England?”
“Yes. They are ruled by a prime minister. However, they also have a queen: Queen Elizabeth. She was crowned in 1953, and before that, she was called the Heir Presumptive.”
I interjected. “Presumptive? I’ve heard of the term ‘Heir Apparent.’”
My teacher smiled. “If her parents had a son after she was born, he would have been entitled ‘Heir to the Throne.’ The titles are specific and are taken very seriously in Great Britain.”
I nodded, not truly understanding the traditions and terminology.
“Anyway, as I was saying, Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of England, a position that is now relatively ceremonial. However, despite that, she has to act like a monarch at all times. When royalty visits her country, the official position is that they visit the Queen. In addition, the Queen has to give royal affirmation before any bill from parliament becomes law.”
I nodded, not quite understanding where my teacher was going with this.
“In reality, the Queen’s job is to remain neutral in political matters. The Queen signs all laws as a mere formality. The Queen and her family still act in public as they are expected to… something that we in the United States sometimes consider pompous. However, the nobility in Britain take their titles seriously. Her son Charles, the Duke of Cornwall, became the Prince of Wales in 1958, although the ceremony didn’t take place until 1969 at the age of twenty-one. He is the Heir Apparent to the British Throne.”
“OK…” I said slowly, very much confused.
“I’m sorry for rattling on about this. It’s one of my passions, actually. Anyway, there is a term that is applied to people of noble birth. I forget the person that coined the term, but it’s called ‘Noblesse Oblige’—the obligation of nobility to act according to a noble code of conduct, just like the ancient knights—acting for the good of all the people without regard to yourself.”
“Noblesse…?”
“Noblesse Oblige,” Mr. Stiles repeated. “It’s French, and means, literally, ‘Noble Obligation.’”
“Noblesse Oblige,” I said, trying out the expression.
“I was explaining about power before, and it occurred to me that in order to wield power properly, you need to use it selflessly. Let’s take you for example.”
This last statement startled me. “Um… me?”
“You, Mr. Crittenhouse,” Mr. Stiles said, smiling. “You are an extremely gifted and talented musician. Jean Proilet raved about you even while you were in junior high school. Last year when you took over the Jazz Band, you could have used it as a platform to show everybody think you were great. I’ve seen other students in similar situations do things like that. However, you allowed your fellow musicians take their solos, and made each member look great. I went to every one of your concerts, and to each performance of the school musical. Not once did you take a solo! You were just at the podium, letting every other student shine.”
As usual, such praise from a teacher started to embarrass me.
“Now do you see what I mean by the responsibilities of power?” Mr. Stiles asked.
“Huh?”
“Instead of shining the spotlight on yourself, which would have been easy, you instead shined that spotlight on your fellow students.” My history teacher put his hands together. “Everybody realized that it was you behind the scenes that was responsible for the spring concert. You were there arranging parts, helping your fellow students rehearse, and, if my information is correct, even helping an athlete learn to read music in just a few months. You may not have known the term ‘Noblesse Oblige,’ but you were living it.”