For a social pariah, music was just the lifeline I needed to rescue me from the depths of the lonely, pitiful abyss into which I would, no doubt, have fallen. Playing trombone in the band resulted in me belonging to a group to which I was able to make a useful contribution. It was almost as good as having friends. I had my own part of the music to play and, if I did my part well, my contribution helped create a product that was pleasing and enjoyable to the listeners, two of whom where my parents. Between playing the trombone and working my way through the ranks of the Boy Scouts, I was building a solid foundation on which my future could stand.
I played that trombone all the way through my first-and-only-year of college. I played in concerts in elementary school, junior high school and high school. I marched with the bands in high school and college. I played at the pep rallies and the home football games all through high school. Once a week I took a private lesson from Hap Hallor (I’m not sure of the spelling of his name). Hap was a great trombone player. He had a special trombone with a lever near the mouthpiece which allowed him to play without having to extend the slide past the middle of its range. He needed that valve since, due to a birth defect, he had very short and deformed arms with no real fingers at the end. There were just a couple of little appendages on the end of each arm that allowed him to pick up small objects, for anything else he had to use both arms. He sure could play that trombone, though, and he was a good and patient teacher. I was a terrible student, though, and didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity I was given to learn from this wonderful man. I learned enough to be able to play in both the high school marching and concert bands, and that was good enough for me. I didn’t really want to become a trombone virtuoso; I just wanted to be part of the band. I enjoyed being part of the band and the trombone parts of the music were interesting and challenging. The one drawback of playing trombone is that it is definitely not an instrument that attracts the attention of women, and, in high school, attracting the attention of the women in my peer group became more and more important.
Once I took up the trombone, my dad felt the need to satisfy his own artistic side and took up playing the trumpet for a short while. When that didn’t prove to be the answer to his need, he handed the trumpet down to my brother and took up guitar. He bought himself a nice little nylon-stringed, classical guitar and began to learn to play it. He worked his way through the beginner’s instruction book, but the guitar wasn’t the emotional or artistic outlet he was looking for either. As soon as his interest in the guitar had waned, I asked him if I could borrow it and try to learn to play. He was willing to let me try and handed over the guitar and the instruction books. He even showed me how to hold the guitar pick and got me started on a chord or two. I tried to learn it from the books he gave me, but they just didn’t have any songs in them that I was interested in playing. I found a music store that sold contemporary song books, bought a couple and brought them home to see what I could do with them. They had these little pictures above the music that showed where to put your fingers to make the chord called for in that part of the song. I spent hours and hours making my fingers bend into the required positions so that I could make the chords. Once I was able to play the chords quickly enough, I could then use the guitar to accompany myself as I sang the song. Now we were getting somewhere. Playing the guitar and singing were most certainly two skills that would attract the attention of the girls.
Of course, by this time, I had already attached myself to a lovely lady from the neighborhood and I would play to her over the phone in the evenings after school. I learned to play “The House of the Rising Sun,” first. It was great. I had a song I could sing and play that was also currently playing on the radio as performed by Eric Burdan and the Animals. I was almost “cool” for a moment, at least in my mind. My girlfriend sometimes thought so, too. My dad was pleased that the guitar was being played, though he would rather I had learned to play it properly and not just as an accompaniment to my singing. My mother, for some reason, disliked my guitar playing altogether. She never did say why, but she made it clear to me that she disapproved of the whole concept of my singing and playing. She wasn’t the girl I was trying to impress, though, so I kept on practicing and learning new songs and even writing a few of my own.
I was still playing the trombone, too, but only because I enjoyed being in the band. I maintained my trombone skills enough so that I could keep up with the other players in the band, but no more than that. As long as I stayed out of trouble with the band director, band was a guaranteed “B” grade every semester. That was about the only “B” that I got during high school. I was basically a “C” student as long as I was in classes that built on skills that I had acquired from previous years. For some reason, though, I wound up being enrolled in “AP” science classes. The “AP” stood for advance program and I was flattered that I was considered an advanced student, but I soon discovered that I was in no way qualified to be in these classes.
Sometime before I started high school, I was put into an experimental mathematics program called SMSG (Student Mathematics Study Group). In the SMSG program I was taught something that vaguely resembled math and algebra, but what I was taught was not what I needed in the “AP” science classes, so when it came time to do the required mathematics in those classes, I was adrift in a sea of ignorance and incomprehensibility. I was being asked to apply mathematical concepts which I had never even heard of before that time. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, or the remotest notion of how to do it. I didn’t even have enough knowledge to ask the right questions so that I might receive some small clue as to how to proceed. I thought it was just some failing on my part to understand what I had been taught. I didn’t realize until years later that the problem was that I had never been taught the required math concepts in the first place. I got “Ds” in those classes. I should have gotten “Fs.” When my parents asked me what was wrong, I told them that I didn’t know. That turned out to be the absolute truth. I actually did not know. I didn’t know the math. I had never even heard of the math I was supposed to be using. I figured that it must be my fault for not getting it. Why would they put me in these advance classes if I didn’t have the math skills to handle the material? I was obviously a poor student. It was a great relief to me, many years later, when I finally figured out what had happened, but at the time it was a nightmare. No one could understand why I was doing so poorly in school and I was constantly asked what was wrong with me. Scholastically, high school was a complete disaster for me, but socially and artistically I made great advancements, and that was what saved me.
Music saved me, and literature helped, too. I learned to love reading in high school. Of course, I read very little of the required material, that stuff was awful and the teacher would pick it apart and analyze it until even the most interesting of material was sucked dry and rendered lifeless. We read an abridged version of “Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens and I rather enjoyed the writing style so I began reading Dickens. I would walk around with a nine-hundred page paperback of one of Dickens’s novels and my peers would remark that I must have lost my mind to be reading something as long and obscure as that. In fact, I found my mind through my readings. I learned more from my extracurricular studies than I ever did from my teachers or my textbooks. I learned to love books and good writing and that has saved me on more than one occasion throughout my life. I still read constantly. We have a whole house full of books. I like being surrounded by books; they are filled with old friends who never change and I look forward to visiting them from time to time. I like knowing that they are always there waiting for me to come visit with them, walk with them, learn from them, or just sit quietly with them whenever I have the notion and the time. More than TV or radio, or parties and dances, or even family, it was the books and the music that saved me. And the Girl. Always the Girl.
The music and the books kept me sane, but the Girl made me happy. She lived just a few blocks away in the neighborhood. She had braces on her teeth and she was two years younger than I, but once we started dating, those things didn’t seem to matter much. In fact, I found the braces rather appealing, though she never believed it when I told her. She was beautiful and we spent as much time together as we could. If we weren’t physically together somewhere, we were on the phone breathing and sighing at each other. I would sing to her or play bits of the new song I was learning on the guitar while she listened on the other end of the line. My parents would eventually yell down to tell me to get off the phone, and I would reluctantly hang up. She and I had the usual childish upsets and occasional break-ups, but we always got back together. She was my constant companion and trusted friend. I loved her, I still do in a way. The high school years passed, though, and I graduated and went off to college. There were a great many distractions in college, but I would still hitchhike home on as many weekends as I could to see her. It wasn’t the same. She was still in high school and had her own set of distractions and her own life to live. We tried to keep up the pretense that we were still a couple, but it was never going to be the same again.
My family and I moved to Colorado after my first-and-only-year of college. I got a job in a factory. I missed the Girl terribly; she was all that I could think of most of the time. I would call her on the weekends from a pay phone. I would buy rolls of quarters and talk to her until I had used them all up. It just wasn’t the same. We drifted apart and my heart broke. It was the books and the music that saved me again. I would stack up some LPs on the turntable, put on my headphones, pick up my book and read while the rock-and-roll music played. I worked in the factory all day and read, with the music playing in the headphones, all evening and I survived. The music and the words in the books helped keep the pain under control, and, after some time had passed, I learned to live with the heartache and the loss. I’ve never forgotten, though, and I’ve never been completely free of that lost love. I have another love now who is just as good a friend and just as constant a companion. We have been together now for over thirty-three years and I am blessed to have such a loving, understanding, demanding and intelligent partner. We’ll be together until our hearts stop beating and perhaps even beyond that. I’m happy to have known and loved both of them, my first love and my last love. My life’s adventure is far from over and having a loving companion with whom to share it is the best part of the story. No matter what the end of this tale may bring, love can never leave us with other than a happy ending. I have it all now, the books, the music and, of course, the love. The music is on CDs now, or on my MP3 player. I still pick up my guitar now and then, though not as much as I used to. The books are all around me, my love is nearby and the adventure continues.
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