I’m still learning to play the old banjo. Slowly. In my own way. I have looked up online tutorials, yet remain unmoved by them. Unconvinced. They can’t unlock what’s inside. There is no mournful hillbilly trapped beneath my ribs, I suppose. No darn’-tootin’ soul. Just another white-boy guitar player, drawn to this Black instrument. In ways he’ll never fully understand.
My eleven-year-old son started drum lessons recently. Once a week we drive him to the local music store. He goes upstairs for half an hour in a tiny room. Two drum kits wedged side-by-side. Bang, crash, bang.
I think he just likes to hit things, mostly. Sometimes he starts absent-mindedly whacking the couch cushions and I tell him to take it out on the kit. He does, and it sounds okay. I hear him steadying himself, finding the groove.
My son’s teacher likes to watch golf videos on his phone between lessons, he tells me. Maybe the teacher’s trying to improve his playing, too. Aren’t we all? Trying to get better at something. Closer to something. To ourselves. In our own way.
His seven-year-old sister has taken up the piano. She has a pink ukulele from her uncle and aunt, too, and my old portable record player in her room. She sings along to Taylor Swift LPs almost every morning and evening. Then goes to the same music store as her brother once a week, up the same set of stairs, and learns from a polite young woman, with an old spinet placed against the wall in an otherwise empty room, and what I imagine to be a baby grand’s worth of patience in her heart.
When my daughter comes home, she opens her lesson book against the piano and gives me a window into what she’s learned. Plink, plonk. I love it.
It’s the same small, upright piano that’s always been in our house. I bought it on Craigslist and wrote a few songs on it back in the day. Navigating its chipped-tooth keys (What happened to them?) with the stilted hands of a self-learner who can’t read music. The drums have also hung around a while, in case a drummer happened to show up. My son first tried playing them when he was two, I still have a photograph. Sticks waving, my workshop earmuffs wrapped over his tiny head, big smile on his face.
I’ve left the instruments around the house all their lives, like unbaited traps. Slowly they’ve walked into them. The guitar didn’t stick. Yet. But that’s okay, one guitar dude in the family’s enough. There’s still so much time. So many moods. We don’t want for cacophony.
A luthier once told me that clients sometimes got upset when he removed old lint balls from inside their guitars while repairing them. They felt he’d messed with the instrument’s “mojo”, or something, he said, grinning. I could relate. There’s so much inside of an instrument that we can’t understand. Maybe even parts of ourselves, or those who played them before us.
So there’s dad, in a corner, still plunking those notes on the old banjo. Fallen into his own trap. Still trying to get better, chasing an idea even he doesn’t understand. Picturing those old barbershop shows. The jingle-jangle. The boater hats. The hearty croon. Or round-headed men in denim overalls, hunched around one microphone. Yodel-ay-hoo-hoo.
That’s not me. But we’re all inside the instruments somewhere. Half the fun is figuring out exactly where.
In later life I have always envied those that can play an instrument. Wonderful idea leaving those traps of instruments around the house - you never know where this could end up.
lovely. I keep my guitar and piano smack in a prominent corner of my living room, like those proverbial un-baited traps. it feels like such a failure when I realize they don't catch me for months at a time. tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow I'll play a little...