I was in 10th grade and things were rocky at home. My father and I had never gotten along well. How does one get along with an abusive megalomaniac? Dad was a foreman with a company that installed underground utilities for other companies, the majority of the work being digging trenches, burying conduit, and pulling cable through it for the phone company. He was a proud blue collar worker. After 8 years with the company and a reputation as one of the toughest, most productive foreman, he was head of a large crew and taking down a cool $5.60 an hour.
We didn't get on well, and as I grew older and matured, our relationship deteriorated. He was particularly unhappy about my aspirations as a musician and took every opportunity to let me know about it. I could never understand what his problem was until I grew old enough to realize that music was one thing (maybe THE one thing) that I could do reasonably well, but that he had absolutely no ability to do. He couldn't carry a tune with a bucket. I don't think he could tell which of two pitches was higher or lower. He didn't take well to the notion that there was anything he could not do, and found the idea that I could possibly to something that he couldn't to be particularly repugnant.
On this particular afternoon, I was home after school, practicing my trumpet. I was in my bedroom, but happened, between Arban's exercises, to hear him pull up in the front driveway. I remembered that I had locked the front door, so I rushed to the living room to open it to avoid aggravating him.
As I pulled the door open, he was getting out of his candy apple red Maverick, lunchbox and hard hat in hand. He was wearing his usual work outfit, a short sleeved blue work shirt, stained and patched blue jeans that he only wore for work, and worn cowboy boots. He was a smaller man than me, five feet eight inches tall with a slender yet broad chested build. He wore his hair on the longish side and sported a full beard and mustache. His popeye-esque forearms bulged and were covered with light hair, bleached by days spent working in the sun. He was covered with dirt from head to toe, damp with groundwater and perspiration.
As I stood there holding my trumpet, waiting for him to enter the house, he glared at me across the yard and said "Playing music is no way for a man to make a living."
And try as I might, I could not avoid the thought that invaded my mind at the very nanosecond that his comment ended -- "I've just received career advice from the Mole Man"
Things went downhill over the next few years...
We didn't get on well, and as I grew older and matured, our relationship deteriorated. He was particularly unhappy about my aspirations as a musician and took every opportunity to let me know about it. I could never understand what his problem was until I grew old enough to realize that music was one thing (maybe THE one thing) that I could do reasonably well, but that he had absolutely no ability to do. He couldn't carry a tune with a bucket. I don't think he could tell which of two pitches was higher or lower. He didn't take well to the notion that there was anything he could not do, and found the idea that I could possibly to something that he couldn't to be particularly repugnant.
On this particular afternoon, I was home after school, practicing my trumpet. I was in my bedroom, but happened, between Arban's exercises, to hear him pull up in the front driveway. I remembered that I had locked the front door, so I rushed to the living room to open it to avoid aggravating him.
As I pulled the door open, he was getting out of his candy apple red Maverick, lunchbox and hard hat in hand. He was wearing his usual work outfit, a short sleeved blue work shirt, stained and patched blue jeans that he only wore for work, and worn cowboy boots. He was a smaller man than me, five feet eight inches tall with a slender yet broad chested build. He wore his hair on the longish side and sported a full beard and mustache. His popeye-esque forearms bulged and were covered with light hair, bleached by days spent working in the sun. He was covered with dirt from head to toe, damp with groundwater and perspiration.
As I stood there holding my trumpet, waiting for him to enter the house, he glared at me across the yard and said "Playing music is no way for a man to make a living."
And try as I might, I could not avoid the thought that invaded my mind at the very nanosecond that his comment ended -- "I've just received career advice from the Mole Man"
Things went downhill over the next few years...
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