CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
No, the first musician was not Zog, who stretched a piece of mastodon gut between two sticks and started plucking on it, while everybody else went out the back door of the cave and waited until he was through with what they called “the bass solo,” so that they could go back to beating on tortoise shells with sticks, and blowing through the mastodon’s horns and hollowed out willow trigs.
For years I have envied Zog and his friends. Well, his friends more than Zog. I thought it would be great to play a musical instrument. Oh, sure, I played several, in high school. But I mean, play an instrument like you know what you’re doing, not just so you can wear a hot, scratchy uniform. Then I realized that people play trumpets and violins only because they can’t sing.
After all, the voice is the first instrument, the one that everyone plays before any other, the one the nurses on “Call the Midwife” listen for so carefully and rejoice in so happily when a baby wails out its first song. It doesn’t have to play a saxophone before they know it’s part of the music.
One of my most prized possessions is a CD of my friend from age ten, Darrel Guimond, RIP, playing Gospel songs on his trumpet. He was an engineer by education and profession, but he was a musician in heart. I love now to remember him as I hear him play, but what I treasure most is the memory of the way we used to sing together, sitting side by side at Forsythe Church, or in his dad’s jeep, as we roamed the streets of Oakland City looking for girls.
I don’t need to envy people who play cellos and flugel horns. I know that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the trombone but doesn’t. I play the first and best instrument; I’m a singer.
Yes, my voice is croaky, and my range is only about four notes, and I get out of breath and have to gasp at the wrong spots, and I think a key is for grading a test or opening a door, and I forget the words, but that has nothing to do with singing. The only thing that makes a singer good is desire. I’m an excellent singer.
When I woke up in the hospital, and realized that at midnight on my birthday, they had taken me into the operating room and cut me open from Los Angeles to Boston, my biggest concern was not that the pale oncologist told me I’d be dead “in a year or two,” but that I thought I couldn’t sing. I had no diaphragm strength. No problem. I could still mouth “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” That was some of my best singing ever. When it’s early in the morning, and I don’t want to wake anyone, my singing is only in my head, but it is singing, and it reminds me that this is the day the Lord has made, and that I should rejoice in it.
Dennis Heller, my friend of 56 years now [good grief, how did that happen?] is in a Sunday night “song circle.” They have been singing together on Zoom because of covid19. Is that really singing together? Sure, more than ever.
I heard baseball’s Lou Brock tell this story at a cancer banquet: The settlers were huddling together in the fort, with the Indians surrounding them. “I don’t like the sound of those drums,” the fort captain said. A voice came from beyond the walls, “He’s not our regular drummer.”
If all you can do is play an instrument, even a bassoon, that’s okay. We all need to make do with what gifts we have. But even if the regular drummer is away, and the beat is shaky, there is no need to say, “Well, I can’t make music, because there’s no piano here,” or “Some kid stole my clarinet because he heard someone say it’s a licorice stick.” The first musical instrument is always available, and all you need in order to play it is desire. Sing not like nobody is listening, but like everybody is listening, for we need your song.
John Robert McFarland
The cartoon, of course, is
from “The Far Side,” by the great Gary Larson.
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