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I don’t know if I’m admitting to a flaw, gift, or curse, but if I can’t listen to Music for a whole day, I begin to get sick. My stomach turns upside-down, I get a horrific headache that leaves me writhing in pain on the inside, and I don’t want to eat or sleep or drink or have any contact with anybody other than my CD player or my iPod, the latter being the love of my life.
Since my mother is a successful harpist (she plays in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) and my father is a band director at my middle school (he has been my own director for the past three years), I pretty much grew up within Music. As I previously mentioned, my iPod is the love of my life; it houses my sacred collections of songs that make my heart go aflutter, ranging from classics such as Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet to more recent tunes, like Dan Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band.
Have you noticed I have capitalized the word Music? You grammar snobs might get goose bumps of hatred out of this, but I consider Music to be a person; a person who follows all of us around, a person who is our best friend, our single confidant. If Music is a person, should it not be considered a proper noun? Proper nouns, as everybody knows, are always capitalized, so, put simply, Music should be capitalized. Although not everyone meets me eye-to-eye in this opinion, whenever Music is spoken, thought, or present in this book, it shall be without a doubt capitalized.
One thing you must know is that I am not simply a Musical admirer. I play three instruments, the piano, the oboe, and the trombone, I sing professionally, and I arrange my own Music. As I said before, my own father is my band director. I very easily get sick of people asking me this, so here’s the answer: yes, he makes me practice harder than other students. You might think it awkward that my own father is my band director, but it actually is the best experience of my musical life so far. In fact, he inspired my to go the extra mile by learning to play three instruments. I started out on the oboe, but when one of Dad’s ex-students came in the sixth grade to play his trombone for us, I was completely inspired. That horn…it was just so beautiful, so sleek…and that sound! The sound of a successfully played trombone still gives me goose bumps. Even thinking of it gets me excited!
Now that I’m done explaining my background story, I suppose I’ll start off my musical adventure.
The bell rings, its electronic sound pulsating through the hallowed corridors of the school. A brief moment of silence passes, some of the most deafening silence ever to be heard on the face of the planet. Suddenly, doors slam open and hordes of teenagers, ranging from short Asian students to tall Caucasian students to round African-American students, fill up the hall as if a floodgate had opened. The monstrous chattering of these students take up the remaining corners of the packed hallway while everyone treks off to their own connection (extra classes required by the school), some to Tech Ed., some to P.E., some to Band, and some to Chorus. Others prance off towards the Orchestra room to polish up their violin or cello skills for the upcoming Orchestra concert. Some dismayed students sulk off to depressing classes such as Health (it’s Sex Ed. season, so they have a valid reason to sulk) or Math or Language Arts Enrichment.
As for me, I head off to Band, ready to play my heart out on the oboe. It’s a Wednesday, so I have Band until 4:00 P.M., the time I get out of school. Since my class before Band is on the other side of the school, it takes me a good three minutes to get to the band room. As soon as I enter, a tsunami of miscellaneous sounds such as Band students prattling to one another and the occasional trumpeter practicing their scales washes over me.
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Comment please!
--Fuzzy
