On Music and Getting What's Coming

In second grade, we had a flutaphone concert.  We played "Lightly Row" and "Hot Cross Buns."  

For third grade, we were supposed to graduate to recorders.  Instead, the school had a turnover and I ended up being the only boy in third grade.  

Somehow, I've looked down at the recorder as a silly thing ever since.  

Mrs. Anderson, one of the most dynamic and inspiring teachers I've ever seen, played Renaissance music on an alto recorder and redeemed the instrumental family somewhat, but I'm a tuba player.  Little flutey things are silly novelties at best.  

So this morning I was in B2S, which sells stationery, art supplies, school whatnots, movies, books, and magazines.  On the bottom of a sale table in the back of the store, I found a Yamaha soprano recorder.  Not even the nice, two-tone version I had way back in the day.

I bought it.  

It took a full hour before I got bored with the diatonic potential and opened the instruction sheet to figure out chromatics.  

And suddenly it's night, the afternoon's thunderous downpour has come and gone, and my butt's numb from sitting in one position for too long.  

One day, I'll have a place where playing a tuba won't disturb a few hundred highly excitable indigenous folks, and, God willing, I'll have the physiology to do so.  

Until then, how cool to make music on something so dinky--the sucker could fit into a standard music folder.  It almost makes up for the shrilling, piercing, nature of the thing.  

Maybe it's mattayom's hidden blessing: sixty pre-pubescents shrieking in a concrete room has dulled my sensitivity to previously unacceptably shrill noises.