Awhile back I posted a two-page story I wrote in a creative writing class, and told you I would post another. But I never did, because my fellow class members didn't like this one, didn't like the ending, didn't like the title, thought it was kinda boring, etc, and I was going to fix it before I posted it. And then I could never figure out what would fix it. But I went back and read the original this morning and I like it better than any of the versions I tried to "fix," so here you go.
From a writing standpoint, the interesting thing I learned is that even though it is somewhat autobiographical (I started playing drums in my 50s), as soon as I made her a clarinet player, she became someone else, someone not me (I play flute). First hand experience of what authors mean when they say a story is based on their own experience, but not autobiographical.
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When Judy Warren had been playing drums for about a year, her teacher told her she was ready to play in the community band. Judy looked at him doubtfully. She might be in her fifties, but she was still a beginner, and the community band was good. The music they played was hard.
But her teacher was persuasive. And he was the leader of the percussion section, so he promised he wouldn’t assign her any parts that were beyond her skills. She finally decided to do it, because she could always play triangle. Anybody can play the triangle, right? Ding!
Judy was ahead of some beginning musicians because she knew how to read music. She had played clarinet for decades, since she was eight years old at a public school in Dallas. She had picked clarinet because her grandmother had told her she should. Her grandmother had a shelf of Benny Goodman albums and thought he could do no wrong. In Judy’s eyes, her grandmother could do no wrong.
Nearly fifty years later, Judy hadn’t played her clarinet since she couldn’t remember when. In fact, she wasn’t exactly sure where it was. But her children were off at college, and she needed a new challenge, and one day at the library she saw a flyer advertising drum lessons. She remembered being envious of the drummers, who played at the back of the band and always seemed to be having fun. The clarinets sat right under the director’s nose and could never get away with anything.
So she called the number on the flyer, and started to learn. She was awful. At age fifty-four, you don’t very often do things that make you look bad, especially in front of people. It was embarrassing, showing up for her lesson every week and knowing that she wasn’t as good as the fifteen-year-old that had the lesson before her, or even the twelve-year-old that had the lesson after. But she kept going. Soon she was no longer awful, just mediocre.
Her friends thought she was crazy. She spent hours a week practicing, and no one she knew was doing anything similar. None of them knew how to play any musical instrument at all (except she found out her friend Liz had minored in piano performance in college but didn’t even own a piano anymore). They couldn’t understand why she would want to spend hours every week banging on drums like a teenager.
It wasn’t until she showed up for her first community band rehearsal that she realized why she had wanted to do this. Making music, each of you reading black marks on a page and playing your part, was miraculous. There was nothing else like it in her life. It was three months until their first concert, but even with all the rough edges of early rehearsals, there were moments that lifted her soul. She remembered what it was like to make something beautiful with a group of people who had nothing else in common.
Playing clarinet in her high school marching band had been her life. They sweated and practiced under the August sun. They stood nervously together under the lights waiting for half-time to start. They traveled (oh, those school buses) and won competitions. They banded together and thumbed their band nerd noses at their high school’s strict social hierarchy. It had been a place where she belonged.
Percussionists don’t play just one single instrument. There are snare drums and tom-toms, the big bass drum and the tiny triangle, marimbas and bells, cymbals and wood blocks and maracas and chimes. And tympani. There was one woman whose only job was to play the tympani.
As the newcomer, Judy played all the parts that no one else wanted to play. She counted and counted, then crashed the cymbals at the climax of the first movement. She played the wood blocks at the beginning of another piece, and dinged the triangle on the second and fourth beat of each measure for nearly a page in another. By the end of the first rehearsal, she was exhausted.
But it was fun. And the second rehearsal was even better—she was starting to learn her way around. She made the comforting realization that even experienced drummers get lost while sight-reading. She came home and told her husband that playing in the community band was the best thing she’d done in years.
During her third rehearsal, right in the middle of a tense moment in the hardest piece they played, she whizzed by the percussion table to grab the crash cymbals and her hip caught the black flannel tablecloth. Maracas, wind chimes, wood blocks, and two sizes of triangles went crashing down. She wanted to sink through the floor, because everyone turned around to see what had happened.
But after that initial turning of heads, no one said a word. The conductor didn’t even pause. One by one, for the rest of the rehearsal, the other drummers came by with amusement in their eyes and whispered their own mistakes. One had knocked over a similar table of instruments during a competition. One had dropped a pair of cymbals in the middle of a concert. Another simply said, “Welcome to the percussion section! We’ve all done it!” She suddenly, deeply understood why drummers were so fiercely loyal to each other. And she determined, just as fiercely, not to let them down.
