When the kids came home one afternoon, Mike wanted a guitar lesson. Now Elise wanted one too. I no longer had a reason to practice being around children, but they didn’t know that. We sat outside in the yard. I didn’t want them to see that in addition to my hideous lamp shade, my lame TV, and my pathetic plant that was still sitting on the floor, I now had a whole bunch of new stuff crowded into the center of my place, some of it in boxes. I hadn’t gotten rid of the old stuff yet, or set up the new stuff. Since I had recently lost the energy and motivation that a project of this scale would require, it might all just sit there for a long, long time.
“I have something for you, Mike,” I said, “something just for you.”
“What is it?” he said. “Is it a teeny, tiny guitar, because I want to hold it myself.”
“Not a guitar. But you can hold it yourself. It’s a whole other instrument.” I went inside and got a bag from a music store from where it lay on top of one of the cartons. I came out and handed him the little bag. He pulled out the box that was inside. “It’s a harmonica. I’ll show you how to play it. Elise is big enough to hold this guitar, so the two of you can play a song together.” I braced myself for his negative reaction.
“Like a band!” Mike said.
“Right,” I said, “You got it. Because you know how in a band, people play different instruments? And I’ll play with you too.”
Mike put the wrong side in his mouth and blew. Nothing happened, and he looked crushed.
I turned it around for him. “OK,” I said. “Now you can blow into the holes and make noise or breathe in through the holes and make noise. Try it a little. Good. Now, look at the top here. See those little numbers? Those are going to help you play songs. I want you to practice blowing through 4, then breathing in—that’s called drawing—through 6 a couple of times. Right. Perfect.” I turned on my stool to face Elise. “Now, Elise, see if you can make your fingers look like mine. That one, right there. Now push down so that the string is against the neck of the guitar.”
“Ow,” Elise said.
“Yeah, it’s a little painful. If you practice enough, you’ll get calluses and it won’t hurt anymore.”
“Like on the monkey bars,” she said.
“Exactly. So press these fingers hard against there and then strum the strings with these fingers. Great. See how nice that sounds? Now I’m going to show you another chord, and then you can switch back and forth.”
I worked with them for fifteen minutes. “OK, so that’s all we’ll do for today. I’ll show you more whenever you want.”
Elise stopped strumming and tried to give me back the guitar. Mike, taking his cue from his sister, took the harmonica away from his mouth to hand it over to me.
“Thank you, Mr. Good,” Elise said.
“Thank you, Mr. Good,” Mike echoed.
“You’re welcome. Do you want to keep those a while to practice on?”
Elise said, “Well, yeah. Can we?”
“Sure,” I said. “Practice what I showed you and then I’ll show you some more.”
“OK.” They started to rush home to show their mother.
There was probably something wrong with giving them the instruments to take home, I thought, something that, not being a parent, I had not considered. I tried to figure out what it might be. The harmonica and guitar were not dangerous, so that couldn’t be it. Their mother might not like the noise? It might bother Jeanette upstairs? What could I say to cover my possible mistake? “Do your homework first!” I called after them.
The two of them stopped in their tracks and turned around to look at me. “We don’t have homework!” Elise said. “It’s summer!”
Oh.
I heard them talking excitedly to Robin about their lesson. Throughout the evening, I heard the instruments off and on. They sounded like a rehearsal for an experimental performance piece.
I put together my new desk and started working on the entertainment unit.