A Milano in the moment tastes better than despair...but after you've swallowed it, the pain is still there...

Trumpet Tears

I’ve always told my children that they should find balance between sports and the arts.  I thought they should play an instrument.  And they did.  Until they told me they didn’t want to any more.  I forced it for a while, but even I knew that resuscitating a silenced piano with forced lessons helps no one; nurturing and encouraging can quickly become bribing and intimidating. 
 

Throughout all of the music lessons, I temporarily enjoyed the sounds of banging drums, fumbling piano keys, even the nasally whine of the recorders until finally, I was rewarded with the melancholy sound of my son’s trumpet. 

When my son fell in love with the French horn at a concert, I was thrilled.  He carried that passion for years, playing the trumpet first, to build up to the complexity of the French horn.  And he was a decent player.  I imagined him playing Taps one day. 

 

Then the inevitable happened.  His friends dropped out, one by one.  The music became more difficult.  He got too hungry on the band bus after school.  He stopped practicing.  Then one day, he forgot the lesson altogether.  So did I.

We tried a variety of approaches (bribes).  Ok you can have a donut when you go to band.   You can stay up to watch that show if you practice for 20 minutes.  If I don’t hear that trumpet, you’re not going to hear that iPod!  And then finally, slowly, I came to my senses, remembering that you can’t extort passion from someone.  Nor should you.  A parent’s job is to lead the baby horse to water, not to dunk its head in it.

I’m not sure why I was slightly tearful when we finally told him he could quit playing trumpet.  True, I was mourning his childhood a bit, witnessing perhaps the last musical instrument to come bellowing through our house.  But was I also watching him say goodbye to his passion simply because it became too difficult?  Had I sent my son the wrong message by letting him quit?   Did we teach him enough about the value of practice and discipline? 

 

Then I thought of my son, this child who stays out in the backyard catching pop flies until well past dark,   the same boy who clears away snow in the driveway, so he can practice his foul shots.  I’ve seen him scramble out of bed early on Saturday morning to catch his dad heading to the field with the dog, in the hopes that if he brings his bat and glove, he might get in some hitting or pitching practice, this kid who goes to basketball games just to take shots on the empty nets on the other side of the gym. 

My son didn’t get the wrong message about quitting.  And he didn’t miss the lesson on the value of practice and discipline.

When he set down his trumpet, this boy wasn’t saying goodbye to his passion; he was making room for it.

 

Twittering in My Boots

Ok I just did a trial run, sending invitations out to some friends to this blog.  I sent one to myself, because the first round of invitations didn't go out properly.  Well, they went out, but they are still out.  They never landed.   My column in the paper this week has my name under a picture of a local artist...somehow, funny flattering and awkward.  I hope she laughs the way Jeff and I did this morning...I may ask her if I can just use that picture since it is much better than any of mine...

Dirty details...exerpts

But, no matter the type of detail, let me be clear: when I take the time to send a text, I like a little something back.  Even if you want to talk about halogen headlights or rack-and-pinion steering.  Give me something.  What I do not want to find, ever, when I open a text, is this:  k
That makes me want to send back this: fu
 At least say something like:  “k let’s do lunch sometime” or “k how awesome are you??!”   Every time I see that lame little k, with nothing else, I become enraged.  
If people who feel overwhelmed by too many details have the right to say TMI, then I am going to start saying NEI (NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION)  
Then when they tell me to STFU, I’ll just say “k”.  See how they like it.

As I began my run this morning, I was distracted by the smell of BO.   Running can be difficult for me, especially as I first try to get going, so this created quite a distraction for me.  After a few minutes, the smell became more distracting, almost suffocating.  How was it that I smelled this bad already? I don't even usually smell after a long run.  What was even more disturbing, I realized, and what became even more distracting about the BO, in addition to its strength, was that it was not mine.  Yeah, not my odor.  This was a pungent, tangy cross between raw onions and jambalaya.  Worsening the situation, seemingly by every pounding footstep, was that it seemed to be emanating from the shirt, rather than my body.  Reassuring in one sense to learn that I hadn't suddenly started smelling like cajun food, it was disarming (disarmpitting?) to realize that I had a fetid creepy shirt on belonging to someone else.  I had grabbed this shirt out of the laundry basket, clearly a basket of dirty, not clean, clothes... In any event, the smell became so distracting that I had to really work to keep my mind on my jog.  Because of my time limits, stopping to get another shirt was not an option, so I kept going.    In addition to being distracted and disgusted, I became confused, almost slightly disoriented.  Whose odor was this and how did it get on my shirt?   Not to sound too dramatic, but it felt like a haunting.  Changing after the run confirmed my fears.  I smelt virtually like a daisy, while the shirt carried the odors of pig farm, sprinkled with cumin.  I tossed the haunted shirt into the laundry, thankful to be free of the smell, but worried that I had yet another challenge for my jogging regimen, just one more excuse that I didn't need:  My time was off today, my shirt was haunted.