Mr. Hunter the music teacher.
[inspired by the love of my life Taisha's blog
My elementary school music teacher was Mr. Hunter. He was a nice enough older gentleman. Kind of like a Mr. Rogers but with a gruffer demeanor. He wore the same green sweater every week.
Everything was fine and fun until one day he told us that his sister had died. From then on Mr. Hunter became the epitomy of Melancholy. We no longer sang or did anything musical during that hour every Thursday. We'd start to... then he'd stop us and relate the some minor detail from the song into a story about really how cruel the world was. We were singing a really depressing song about a grandfather clock that was built the day a baby was born (grandfather clocks only take one day to build?) and stopped the day the baby who had grown up to be an old man-died. I remember the chorus to this day "The clock (beat) stopped (beat) never to strike again when the ooollld maaannn dieeeed."
He stopped us and said "That's a sad song.. Why are you kids singing such a sad song.. Let's not sing that song any more."
Another day after singing "America" from West Side Story he told us about a trip to Mexico he took with his sister. They were walking down a street and had to step over what they thought was a sleeping child and commented on how sad that was. Then as they were actually stepping over the kid they saw a rat gnawing on the kids hand and realized the child was dead.
I was in 3rd grade. That was probably the scarriest thing I had ever heard in my life at that point.
Mr. Hunter was forced into retirement the next year.