Band

Number Five has started band lessons.

He brought home his new baritone, pulled it out of the case and blew a couple blasts. Their cat's ears went down and she headed for parts unknown.

I'm sorry, Cat, but it's going to get worse before it gets better, and, here's the thing. It may never get better.

When I was going into the fifth grade, my mother arranged for me to go to school and choose my band instrument.

Both my sisters had musical talent, which my mother loved. I guess it would be a reasonable assumption that the talent would go three for three in the family.

But it was not to be. By the time I was eleven, I had a pretty solid belief that I was without musical talent, and had some pretty solid evidence to back it up, starting with the way the elementary music teacher refused to make eye contact with me during choir practice.

I did not want to be in band. Not at all. Sure, they got to sit on the stage during basketball games waiting for halftime to perform, but as far as I could tell, that was the only upside. My mother was not deterred, so there we were, in the band room talking to Mr. Pierce on a pleasant summer evening when there was literally no place else I wouldn't rather be.

I eyed the trombones and other snappy horns, but Mr. Pierce looked at me and what he saw was a tuba player.

Mr. Pierce wanted a tuba player coming up through the ranks, my mom wanted to do anything to keep Mr. Pierce happy, and I...well, I was only eleven.

I'm not quite sure how we got the practice tuba home, but we did and it took up almost every bit of free floor space in my bedroom.

The deal I'd struck with my mother was that at the end of the summer when students had to purchase their instruments, we’d call the whole thing quits if I still hated it. The fly in the ointment was that because tubas were so expensive, the school provided them. Thus, there was no purchase deadline. As far as my mother was concerned, that rendered the whole deal null and void.

As far as I was concerned, her opinion was bad form - very bad form indeed.

I showed, fairly quickly, that I was the one with the most accurate appraisal of my talent level. Someone once said to me, “If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk, you can sing.” I think that person's an idiot.

If every now and then I managed to play the correct note it was an accident, and more importantly, it was news to me.

I'm not saying I broke the band instructor's spirit, but after teaching in my home town for around twenty years, he fled to a different school system when he’d given me lessons for a few months. The new guy didn't interview me before he accepted the position, so that was on him.

The new band instructor and I weren't the only ones who were miserable. My bedroom was directly over my parent's and my father, for the next six decades, couldn't shake the memory of laying in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to me practice. For some reason the song I practiced most often was “The Old Gray Mare (She Ain’t What She Used to Be).”

Bum, bum, bum, bum...bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. The notes were randomly different every time, but I nailed the cadence.

After about a year and a half of mutual musical misery, the band instructor gave up on the thought of me ever producing discernible notes and offered to let me take up the drums, in order to fulfill my musical dreams. When I explained that I did, in fact, have no musical dreams, he offered to talk to my mother. She'd been listening to “The Old Gray Mare” for eighteen months as well, and she caved.

My grandson has shown evidence of being far more talented than I, so I'm predicting a better outcome. But, Cat, you may be in for a bad few months.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olson