ALL GOD’S CHILDREN GOT RHYTHM

(Except for those that don’t.)

It is not true that my parents were mean people.There was never any beating, or physical mistreatment in our home.There was food to eat and clothes to wear, and we were allowed to sleep inside. Still, during the middle part of my first childhood, I wondered why I had been placed in their care. Why was I forced into a situation for which I had so little aptitude and zero interest?

In the course of their own childhood experiences, each parent had learned to play a musical instrument. My mother had been a violin player, and also played something called a French horn. My father had played the clarinet in the school band. The cool people called a clarinet a “licorice stick” for its black color. There is or was some divergence of opinion about the quality of my mother’s playing. Her brother, my uncle, remembers her violin practice sessions with something less than admiration.

My own experience at playing music consisted of Grandma’s attempts to interest me in playing the piano. I loved my Grandma, so I was dutiful in learning to play the scale. Given enough time (say, maybe an hour), I could also figure out what note I was supposed to play from the location of the note on the staff. The notes placed in the spaces on the staff spelled out f-a-c-e. The notes placed on the staff lines generated the sentence “every good boy does fine” by using the initials e-g-b-d-f. At this point, I have no idea whether these memory tricks read from top to bottom or vice versa. Music becomes far too complex for me after this basic instruction.

There are notes of all shapes and sizes and different tempos like 4/4, and 3/4 and 6/8. In addition, notes have an assortment of flags to tell you how long to hold that particular note, and this changes with each piece or when the tempo changes. When you have advanced far enough to understand this part of the business, some clever person will start tying two or more notes together with their respective flags. These might be called chords but I am not really clear on that. The other business about notes is that they not only have an identifying letter, but they also have fractional values. It turns out that music is a mathematical function.

I did learn to find middle C on a piano keyboard. I found it the same way I find the book of Psalms in the Bible. Look in the middle. Here is a question: Does a guitar have middle C, or are all the C notes the same? Another question: Is there a middle D or middle A? Where are they? The truth is I have no idea of the difference in sound from one note to the next. If you asked me to find any note other than middle C on a piano, it would be lucky guesswork if I got any of the other 87 keys right. To her credit, my Grandma had long since given up on my imaginary musical ability.

In our school however, there was a musical nimrod who felt there should be a grade school band. There were also a lot of people in our town who could not mind their own business. They shared the gossip about this hypothetical band with my parents. There was an available used clarinet somewhere in the family attic, and it was placed before me with the direction that I would play this creation in the grade school band.

No one bothered to tell me what hole to cover for C or any other letter/fraction, so I was pretty lost. In addition, my fine motor skills are non-existent. I could usually get the reed end of the clarinet in my mouth all right, but that was about the highlight of the day, clarinet-wise. I know at this point in my life that the clarinet and saxophone are my favorite instruments to hear someone else play. When played well, these horns make nice mellow sounds.

In my feeble attempts to blow air through this pipe, I could occasionally make a noise, but I never knew what it was going to sound like. One time it would sound very much like an enraged Rhode Island Red chicken, and the next time, it would sound like a sissified cougar. NEVER did I get a satisfying, finger-snapping, melodious tootle. It was always the sound of an angry Daffy Duck.

Trying to transfer the highly complex information on the sheet music into a rhythmic activity from my fingers and lungs and thumbs and make a pleasant sound was and is simply impossible for me. It might as well be written in Cyrillic. I was always two pages behind every other person in the band.

On the rare occasions when my horn made a noise, people in the room (including me) would stare in bewilderment, wondering if the Russians were about to bomb us to extinction. (Of course that was a silly idea. We were really well protected from that event because we had been trained to hide under our wooden desks so we would be safe). Happily, there will be no reunion of the third and fourth grade band. My career in band was actually quite brief, although at the time, I was sure that I would dwell in the band room forever.

In the intervening years following my attempted tooting, I have had the opportunity to walk through a schoolhouse where a music teacher has been entrapped to teach grade school band. One always wonders whether they were lured into accepting that position by offers of love or money. When I heard the sounds of grade school band in the hall, I promptly broke into a rash, and sprinted outside. Later, after the children were gone, I walked back past the room, and I could hear the soft sobbing of the music teacher.

I have the greatest respect and admiration for anyone who can teach beginning band without turning into a psychopathic sniper. I feel empathy for those men and women, because they, too, have come to a greater understanding of what eternity really entails. The good news is these gentle folks have no fear of dying. They have already been to Hell.

Dave Rama still contributes bits of humor despite the fact that he has been self-exiled to Chadron, Nebraska.

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