Jun. 6, 2009 - The music, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...
I am sensing a theme. That theme is cold. It occurred to me this afternoon that in joining the band I have gained many growth experiences, opportunities to endure. When else would I choose to march in the rain, drive 8 hours to march and then stand in the frigid morning air for an hour, then drive 8 hours home, or sit and play while the wind is blowing clarinets and music willy nilly over the tarmac? These are situation I would never have found myself in had I not joined the band. I owe them a great deal. And they owe me a few toes lost to frostbite.
This afternoon we played an outdoor concert at the open house of the big air exercise going on at our air base. Last year, you may recall, proved to be disastrous for the clarinet that fell over, and many spent their bars of rests retrieving flying music. Perhaps we should have played “Blowin’ in the Wind” on that occasion. Today promised to be much better. Until the temperature dropped.
With a forecasted high of a cloudy 12 degrees (that’s about 52 F) the bandmaster wisely changed the dress from short-sleeve uniform to “weather appropriate civvies” with a band hockey jersey on top. Well, it’s not really a band hockey jersey, per se, but it is a bag of jerseys the band has for use at sports opening ceremonies and the like. At any rate, we were grateful for the extra layer this put between us and the wind.
The wind was not as strong as last year - only once did my stand begin to tip and for a few minutes require being held down with my foot. But it was colder. We played for nearly an hour, the highlight being a dancing toddler who made a few of us smile while we played.
He began in his stroller, bee-bopping along to the music. His Dad took some photos, and then his mother took him out of the stroller so he could really dance. This little guy couldn’t have been more than 14 or 16 months. And he went with all the force and enthusiasm of an elastic band set free from my son’s fingers! It made playing a little more difficult, but a lot more fun. I almost forgot how cold I was for a minute or two! If only more listeners would enjoy the music with such abandon!
As usual, I learned a few things at this gig:
1. Having already learned that it is difficult to play when you can’t feel your fingers, today I discovered that when it’s not quite that cold (but darn close) playing isn’t too bad, but trilling is still hard to do. It could be due to the inability for frozen fingers to move quickly rather than the lack of feeling in the tips of them. Perhaps both are factors in this phenomenon.
2. I can play while smiling – almost laughing – but if I keep looking up at the adorable toddler dancing his tiny little heart out, I will at some point (or points) lose my place.
3. When I lose my place I can easily find it again because I know the music well…unless, of course, the first note on every line, as well as the ever-important-always-elusive repeat sign, are hidden behind the thingies we use to hold our music onto the stand in windy conditions.
4. Not only do my fingers have a hard time playing at near-sub-zero temperatures, but my brain also loses function as the temperature decreases, which affects my playing accordingly.
5. My clarinet (or rather, the Wing’s clarinet which I used today) does not like playing when it’s cold and windy. Strange sounds came from the bell of my clarinet on more than one occasion…
6. If you have your clarinet standing on its stand just to the right of you, and you’re wearing a hockey jersey that’s about 7 sizes too big, even with the sleeves rolled up they could pose a problem. After switching to my second reed (and just in time for the world’s fastest piece, or at least our fastest piece) because the first one broke (the corner broke off), I noticed that when I had fastened (and I do mean FASTENED) my music to my stand and put my arm back down, the sleeve was dragging over the edge of my mouthpiece…pulling slightly at the corner of my reed and effectively breaking it.
I think the bandmaster was out to get me today. This may not always be the case, but when he said, “Let’s play something we can all play…Luftwaffe March!” I wondered. I recently admitted that this piece is my nemesis. Fortunately I made it through, missing only a couple of sections that give me trouble when there ISN’T cold wind to deal with… But when he announced that we would play “Amparita Roca” which just happens to be the fastest piece in our folder, a piece that I had practiced quite a bit when I first moved to 1st, but haven’t played in many weeks since lately I’ve been spending most of my time practicing the Luftwaffe March for our upcoming concert, I knew. Right after that we played Mack the Knife, which isn’t terribly hard, but has several triplet runs that are best run through before performance, particularly when one’s fingers and brain are cold.
But we did our job, and enjoyed ourselves in spite of the conditions, as we always do. People waiting in line were entertained and occasionally applauded. Little ones danced. Cadets (who were there to help with security, of which my daughter was one) did random drill patterns as they passed by to view the aircraft. And when we got home I filled the tub with the hottest water I could squeeze from the tap.
Hot baths always remind me of the story of the frog. It’s usually told to illustrate how easily we can become accustomed to sin, thereby being overcome by it because of our inoculation to it. In the same way a frog can sit in a pot of comfortable water, and as you gradually turn up the heat it doesn’t realize it’s getting hotter and eventually boils to death. I must, somewhere in my being, be part frog, though I’ve thankfully never become frog soup. But I find a steaming hot bath is the only way to warm up when I’m truly cold, and that proved to be the case today.
Today also happens to be my son’s 13th birthday. Yes, there are officially two teenagers in the house now. They will soon outnumber us. At present we are somewhat like Noah’s ark: Two adults, two teens and two children. He had a fun day with his sisters, and ended it with German pancakes (which are exactly like crepes, but since we got the recipe from my German mother-in-law and they call them German pancakes, we call them that too) and to make them special we even had fresh berries for the filling! We topped it off with Dairy Queen’s new Double Chocolate Brownie Batter Blizzard cake. Only ours was actually a peanut butter cup ice cream cake with the wrong label. It was still very yummy, and it fit in with today’s frozen theme. And now I have about a pot and a half of hot tea to drink to warm up again!
