Writing and Drumming
Once again, I make my way back into the fray. I'm still struggling with what it is that makes me happiest in this world. I'm still puzzling over the idea that I have the right to exist on this planet. I'm still seeing a shrink to deal with the rest of me.
Oddly enough, one of the things that has kept me sane over the last few very difficult years has been the discovery of a particular kind of drumming circle over in Southeast Portland. It's at a little store called Cedar Mountain Drums, and the store itself is almost unassuming in appearance. But I had no idea that stepping inside more than two years ago would have led me to the point I am at now with life. The circle is a place where I do more than share my outrageous rhythms on various African style drums. I feel safe and welcome enough to bare my soul at this place. I can't even say that about my own flesh and blood family.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, after a hell of a lot of internal struggling with self doubt and with life's many, many obstacles, I had the guts to share something of my true voice with my friends at the men's drumming circle three weeks ago. I had written a piece just weeks after my very first men's circle at this place almost two years ago, and I had hidden it away for whatever reasons came to my already confused and frightened mind. Still, I think the piece reflects the very struggles I face when dealing with other people and strange situations. I realize now even as I read it again that so much of what I wrote about is universal. I read this piece out loud to all the other men in my circle three weeks ago, and I share it with you all now because, well, I just want to.
Seven men find themselves sitting in a warmly lit house that doubles as a drum store. I’m one of the seven, and I look around at all these men, realizing that they are all strangers to me except for the one who sits two feet to the left of me. We’re all sitting in a circle in the corner of what might be a living room or a work space. I haven’t quite figured out how this house is laid out. I haven’t figured out how this whole thing is supposed to go, this gathering of men. I don’t even know what the fuck brought me to this place.
I suddenly look to the middle of the living room, which is further to my left. I’ve left a large, black bag in the middle of the whole room, and inside the bag is a large ashiko drum. I nod at that moment as though I suddenly recall something of my reason for being here. In truth, I thought I was looking for some place to bang on that drum and have it be heard and accompanied by other drums in some sort of a musical feast for the ears. But now that I’m here I’m sort of panicked at the thought. I’m going to share my drumming, my rhythms with a bunch of strangers. Perhaps it’s old paranoia bubbling up to the surface of my mind, but I find myself compartmentalizing emotion in my own head, locking away my own vulnerability as I’m sort of used to doing when I’m scared shitless. I’m such a guy that way that it makes me laugh. And as I look at some of the scared and yet weirdly defiant pairs of eyes that stare briefly back at mine, I’m sure that some of the other men in the room are doing that weird macho bullfighter dance in their own heads too. I don’t really know whether or not to be comforted by that, but I find myself breathing a sigh of relief all the same.
The room is already oddly quiet, and yet when the familiar man to my left speaks, it’s as though the very room itself waits with baited breath for his words. He’s a friendly looking man really, a jovial face with crow’s feet around the eyes and laugh lines at the sides of his lips. I can’t see the harm in listening to what this guy’s going to try to sell the rest of us macho assholes, and yet I’m surprised by the looks of satisfied recognition on so many of the other faces in the room. I suddenly feel like an outsider again, an interloper who hasn’t yet been let in on the private joke. I hate it. Yet as I listen to the man’s words, I recognize the principles on which he expounds.
Freedom, respect, and play.
Okay. Freedom and respect I recognize, but that play word, isn’t that something that they reserve for Jello Jellatin ads or for those fucking stupid cereal commercials with the “small child inside all of us adults” kind of bullshit blaring out at me after Saturday morning cartoons? Since when does a grown man tell a room full of defensive, macho pricks to sit there and play? Does he mean play with themselves?
Okay, so I’m trying to get past a lifetime of cynicism and a heck of a lot of “anger issues.” It makes me defensive past the point of most people’s endurance. That’s one reason why I don’t think I make friend’s easily. Maybe this play thing isn’t such a bad idea after all. It’s nice to think that when I’m banging out my anger and my anxiety on the head of my drum that I’m actually playing instead of doing a sick pantomime of the beatings I used to get as a child. Perhaps I didn’t get all of my sick rhythms from the frightened beat of my heart whenever my mother would walk into a room. Maybe, it’s as my father used to tell me when we were on speaking terms.
“Angel, it’s about what’s in your blood. Es el ritmo que tienes en tu sangre.”
The African rhythms that are indeed a part of my Puerto Rican heritage have always drawn me. I used to turn buckets and pots and pans upside down and bang on them like I was Desi Arnaz playing Ba-ba-loo in front of hundreds of people at a richly lit Cuban night club. And sometime in the last five or so years I rediscovered my passion for rhythm as I sort of supported my partner through her exploration of some kind of a Pagan Winter Witch Camp in Minnesota. Even though I sang all the songs and did all the rituals within the community, I felt like a fucking alien. But the one thing that kept me connected to everyone was the rhythm of a drum. I played rhythms on an African drum that I thought would make Tito Puente proud.
It would have made my father smile. I know that much.
These are the things that come to mind as I listen to the familiar man’s words and note the ever present smile on his face. I’m so used to fake or forced smiles in my life. I got them all the time in my former line of work. I also got many of them from members of my own family. I’ve given many of my own fake smiles. I suppose that happens to everyone when they start to grow up and question the roles that they have been given by those around them, the roles that they eventually give themselves. What’s a parent really going to say to those kinds of questions from their kids? Am I going to be ready for that kind of shit when my kid gets old enough? Am I even going to have children, and do I really want to?
My heart skips a beat when the familiar man begins to speak about passing around a talking stick. He tells us all that the use of a talking stick is derived from an ancient Native American tradition of communal sharing in sacred space. Sacred space? I’ve heard those words before. I heard them when I went to that Winter Witch Camp with my partner and drummed my fucking heart out. I suppose now that the space where I and a bunch of people drummed our fucking hearts out that week became sacred.
I nod again as the familiar man continues his speech. Of course it was sacred space! I left the rhythm of my heart in that space, and it was accompanied by the rhythms of other people’s hearts. The “New Age” sound of that concept would have scared me even three years ago. But now, in this space, with this man speaking to the rest of us men as brothers, it feels right.
Ahah! There’s something about what the familiar man said about the word “AHO.” “AHO,” according to this verbose man is a Lakota, Native American word that can be loosely translated to mean “my relations.” Perhaps that’s why I note that he speaks to us men here tonight with such familiarity, as though we are his brothers, his relations. My concept of family is so fucking weird anyway that the word “AHO” seems comical, yet somehow sad. I want to believe that that word, that this guy, that this ritual is for real. I want to believe that he views us other men as his brothers. I want to believe that this man knows what that really means.
And then, as the man nods and holds the talking stick, he begins a new story by stating his name.
“For those of you who are new to our circle tonight, welcome. My name is Patrick.”
It’s a surprisingly practical name for a guy that seems to me to be playing the role of a shaman. It doesn’t surprise me to find out that Patrick is part Native American, and that he might in fact be part Lakota, which might account for his free usage of this “AHO” word.
What also surprises me, other than Patrick’s first name is the frank way in which he begins to share parts of his own life with us. It’s like his familiarity with the rest of us men has now gone up a notch. Did that talking stick do something to this guy’s internal monologue?
Ah bullshit! He isn’t a British secret agent from the sixties being thawed out and put back into comedic action. And this isn’t dinner at my family’s house. This isn’t a Christmas party with my family en mass pretending that they love each other when they secretly feel like they want to cut one another to pieces with words.
I didn’t used to think that words meant anything to me until I discovered that I loved them so much, or until I discovered that the words that come from those you love can quickly hurt or heal you.
And now Patrick has said “AHO,” and we’ve all chorused the word back at him like schoolchildren. He’s passed the stick to the man to his left. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden this means a whole slew of things that I’m not sure I am prepared for. I didn’t wander to this place to listen to the life stories of six other men tonight. Perhaps I’m even less prepared for the possibility that I would have to share MY story.
What? Oh yeah, Patrick said somewhere in his first speech that we were free to share as little or as much as we wanted.
But the pressure’s on isn’t it? Ah shit! What the fuck am I going to say when the man to my right passes that fucking stick to me? Damn! I better make this good. I’d like to say something profound and relevant. But how the hell am I supposed to know what’s relevant to a bunch of strange guys?
Ah hell, maybe I’ll come up with something if I listen really hard.
Alright! Now I cross my legs, put my elbows on my knees and listen to the next guy. And I listen to the portly gentleman with the receding hairline that follows. And I listen to the young guy with the buzz cut and the green cargo shorts after that. Then I listen to the really tall guy with the long brown hair and the glasses that look a lot like mine do. And what strikes me about the stories I hear from each man is that everyone seems to be encountering demons from their pasts, and everyone seems to be trying to reconcile themselves with where they’ve been, and where they are at this very moment. Most are looking for some sense of reassurance that they’re not crazy, that they’re normal men trying to fit into an abnormal world.
But somehow, I find myself thinking the exact opposite of myself. I think I’m an abnormal man who’s been trying, for most of his time on this earth, to function as though he was normal. It’s a thought that cuts through my heart like a jagged shard of ice. Fuck, why did I come here? Is this just going to be some other confirmation that I’m some kind of freak who can’t get his ducks in a row?
By the time the talking stick finds its way to the man directly to my right, my heart feels as though it’s going to jump out of my throat and run pell mell from the room. I force myself to focus on the shape and form of the stick, but to me, right now, it looks like a regular old stick. It might as well be a hot poker for all the desire I have to hold it.
But then the man to my right has finished speaking. His speech was all too short, though somehow illuminating all the same. He’s spoken about taking more time to listen to his own heart and to live in the moment. And now the man is reaching out his hand to me, and in his hand is my life. My moment. My talking stick.
And I have no idea what the hell I’m going to talk about.
Being the last member of a circle full of men to receive the talking stick is in my mind more daunting than being the first to speak. The first to speak among a series of people seems to set the mood, and it’s something I’ve come to know in my own mind as setting an emotional precedent. Every speaker that comes after the first one adds their own story with their own words, but those stories often echo the emotions of the first speaker in ways of which the other storytellers are not always aware. The last person is given the task of completing the chain of thought, the series of stories, and in his or her story will be the echo of all the emotions of the previous stories. It seems to me an immense, and sometimes, unfair responsibility when I’m the one who ends up speaking last in these situations.
And it seems I’ve always felt this way. I felt this way when I was the last to give a book report in front of my entire High school freshman English class. I felt this way again when I was forced to go to those fucking “leadership development” retreats in high school and told that, as a brainiac, it was my job to work in groups with other brainiacs to solve imaginary problems that I didn’t give a shit about. I continued to feel this way when I would talk to my old summer camp friends during New Years Eve parties in Scarsdale, NY, and I would find myself feeling embarrassed to be the last to offer a comment or a suggestion in front of the prettiest girl in the room. And when I went to that Winter Which Camp five years ago and our group members would check in with the group one by one each and every time the group met, I hated being the last one to speak
I felt this way and a hell of a lot worse when I spoke at my great grandmother’s funeral years ago, and it was at that moment when I began to wonder if the problem was me.
But that doesn’t matter now, in this room with these other men, does it? How am I going to speak now, and how do I do it with the slightest bit of originality? Haven’t all the good, relevant points been taken tonight? It’s like being passed an apple core after everyone else has cut of their share of the biggest, juiciest apple in the world and eaten it. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this, you jerks?
“Four score and seven years ago, our forefather’s brought forth to this continent a new nation.”
“We the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect Union,..”
“I’d like to thank the academy, and all the beautiful people that have supported me this year...”
My mind is now tumbling, lightning speed, through all the speeches I’ve either heard or read over years. What is it that I thought I would find in these old and useless words? Comedy? Inspiration? A chance to make myself look like an idiot?
Shit.
“Hey, all. Uh, my name is Angel. I’m new and I’m nervous.”
And then it all somehow comes tumbling out of my mouth, which has gone slightly dry.
“I’ve not lived in Portland for long. I’ve not got a job at the moment, and I’m nervous as hell about it. I’m young and I don’t know what to do with my life. I feel old though because I’ve been battling demons for much of my short life on this planet. I’m scared of a lot of things right now, and I hope that that feeling doesn’t last too much longer.
I want to play my drum. Aho.”
OK. Actually, it was a much longer and sort of circular speech than that, cause that’s how my mind really works when I’m nervous. Yet bit by bit, I step out of my own shell and I actually share myself with the other six men in the room. Nobody rolls their eyes or says anything negative. A couple of them even laugh sympathetically. This is a friendly group of men after all, and I’ve now added my voice and my story to their voices and their stories.
I finish my speech and I pass the stick over to Patrick, who thanks me and holds the stick for the last time in circle that night. He speaks a little more about the drums and other musical instruments available to us all tonight, and then he winks and nods to everyone in the room, a twinkle coming to his eyes.
“You’re it, men. Let’s play.”
Oddly enough, one of the things that has kept me sane over the last few very difficult years has been the discovery of a particular kind of drumming circle over in Southeast Portland. It's at a little store called Cedar Mountain Drums, and the store itself is almost unassuming in appearance. But I had no idea that stepping inside more than two years ago would have led me to the point I am at now with life. The circle is a place where I do more than share my outrageous rhythms on various African style drums. I feel safe and welcome enough to bare my soul at this place. I can't even say that about my own flesh and blood family.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, after a hell of a lot of internal struggling with self doubt and with life's many, many obstacles, I had the guts to share something of my true voice with my friends at the men's drumming circle three weeks ago. I had written a piece just weeks after my very first men's circle at this place almost two years ago, and I had hidden it away for whatever reasons came to my already confused and frightened mind. Still, I think the piece reflects the very struggles I face when dealing with other people and strange situations. I realize now even as I read it again that so much of what I wrote about is universal. I read this piece out loud to all the other men in my circle three weeks ago, and I share it with you all now because, well, I just want to.
Seven men find themselves sitting in a warmly lit house that doubles as a drum store. I’m one of the seven, and I look around at all these men, realizing that they are all strangers to me except for the one who sits two feet to the left of me. We’re all sitting in a circle in the corner of what might be a living room or a work space. I haven’t quite figured out how this house is laid out. I haven’t figured out how this whole thing is supposed to go, this gathering of men. I don’t even know what the fuck brought me to this place.
I suddenly look to the middle of the living room, which is further to my left. I’ve left a large, black bag in the middle of the whole room, and inside the bag is a large ashiko drum. I nod at that moment as though I suddenly recall something of my reason for being here. In truth, I thought I was looking for some place to bang on that drum and have it be heard and accompanied by other drums in some sort of a musical feast for the ears. But now that I’m here I’m sort of panicked at the thought. I’m going to share my drumming, my rhythms with a bunch of strangers. Perhaps it’s old paranoia bubbling up to the surface of my mind, but I find myself compartmentalizing emotion in my own head, locking away my own vulnerability as I’m sort of used to doing when I’m scared shitless. I’m such a guy that way that it makes me laugh. And as I look at some of the scared and yet weirdly defiant pairs of eyes that stare briefly back at mine, I’m sure that some of the other men in the room are doing that weird macho bullfighter dance in their own heads too. I don’t really know whether or not to be comforted by that, but I find myself breathing a sigh of relief all the same.
The room is already oddly quiet, and yet when the familiar man to my left speaks, it’s as though the very room itself waits with baited breath for his words. He’s a friendly looking man really, a jovial face with crow’s feet around the eyes and laugh lines at the sides of his lips. I can’t see the harm in listening to what this guy’s going to try to sell the rest of us macho assholes, and yet I’m surprised by the looks of satisfied recognition on so many of the other faces in the room. I suddenly feel like an outsider again, an interloper who hasn’t yet been let in on the private joke. I hate it. Yet as I listen to the man’s words, I recognize the principles on which he expounds.
Freedom, respect, and play.
Okay. Freedom and respect I recognize, but that play word, isn’t that something that they reserve for Jello Jellatin ads or for those fucking stupid cereal commercials with the “small child inside all of us adults” kind of bullshit blaring out at me after Saturday morning cartoons? Since when does a grown man tell a room full of defensive, macho pricks to sit there and play? Does he mean play with themselves?
Okay, so I’m trying to get past a lifetime of cynicism and a heck of a lot of “anger issues.” It makes me defensive past the point of most people’s endurance. That’s one reason why I don’t think I make friend’s easily. Maybe this play thing isn’t such a bad idea after all. It’s nice to think that when I’m banging out my anger and my anxiety on the head of my drum that I’m actually playing instead of doing a sick pantomime of the beatings I used to get as a child. Perhaps I didn’t get all of my sick rhythms from the frightened beat of my heart whenever my mother would walk into a room. Maybe, it’s as my father used to tell me when we were on speaking terms.
“Angel, it’s about what’s in your blood. Es el ritmo que tienes en tu sangre.”
The African rhythms that are indeed a part of my Puerto Rican heritage have always drawn me. I used to turn buckets and pots and pans upside down and bang on them like I was Desi Arnaz playing Ba-ba-loo in front of hundreds of people at a richly lit Cuban night club. And sometime in the last five or so years I rediscovered my passion for rhythm as I sort of supported my partner through her exploration of some kind of a Pagan Winter Witch Camp in Minnesota. Even though I sang all the songs and did all the rituals within the community, I felt like a fucking alien. But the one thing that kept me connected to everyone was the rhythm of a drum. I played rhythms on an African drum that I thought would make Tito Puente proud.
It would have made my father smile. I know that much.
These are the things that come to mind as I listen to the familiar man’s words and note the ever present smile on his face. I’m so used to fake or forced smiles in my life. I got them all the time in my former line of work. I also got many of them from members of my own family. I’ve given many of my own fake smiles. I suppose that happens to everyone when they start to grow up and question the roles that they have been given by those around them, the roles that they eventually give themselves. What’s a parent really going to say to those kinds of questions from their kids? Am I going to be ready for that kind of shit when my kid gets old enough? Am I even going to have children, and do I really want to?
My heart skips a beat when the familiar man begins to speak about passing around a talking stick. He tells us all that the use of a talking stick is derived from an ancient Native American tradition of communal sharing in sacred space. Sacred space? I’ve heard those words before. I heard them when I went to that Winter Witch Camp with my partner and drummed my fucking heart out. I suppose now that the space where I and a bunch of people drummed our fucking hearts out that week became sacred.
I nod again as the familiar man continues his speech. Of course it was sacred space! I left the rhythm of my heart in that space, and it was accompanied by the rhythms of other people’s hearts. The “New Age” sound of that concept would have scared me even three years ago. But now, in this space, with this man speaking to the rest of us men as brothers, it feels right.
Ahah! There’s something about what the familiar man said about the word “AHO.” “AHO,” according to this verbose man is a Lakota, Native American word that can be loosely translated to mean “my relations.” Perhaps that’s why I note that he speaks to us men here tonight with such familiarity, as though we are his brothers, his relations. My concept of family is so fucking weird anyway that the word “AHO” seems comical, yet somehow sad. I want to believe that that word, that this guy, that this ritual is for real. I want to believe that he views us other men as his brothers. I want to believe that this man knows what that really means.
And then, as the man nods and holds the talking stick, he begins a new story by stating his name.
“For those of you who are new to our circle tonight, welcome. My name is Patrick.”
It’s a surprisingly practical name for a guy that seems to me to be playing the role of a shaman. It doesn’t surprise me to find out that Patrick is part Native American, and that he might in fact be part Lakota, which might account for his free usage of this “AHO” word.
What also surprises me, other than Patrick’s first name is the frank way in which he begins to share parts of his own life with us. It’s like his familiarity with the rest of us men has now gone up a notch. Did that talking stick do something to this guy’s internal monologue?
Ah bullshit! He isn’t a British secret agent from the sixties being thawed out and put back into comedic action. And this isn’t dinner at my family’s house. This isn’t a Christmas party with my family en mass pretending that they love each other when they secretly feel like they want to cut one another to pieces with words.
I didn’t used to think that words meant anything to me until I discovered that I loved them so much, or until I discovered that the words that come from those you love can quickly hurt or heal you.
And now Patrick has said “AHO,” and we’ve all chorused the word back at him like schoolchildren. He’s passed the stick to the man to his left. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden this means a whole slew of things that I’m not sure I am prepared for. I didn’t wander to this place to listen to the life stories of six other men tonight. Perhaps I’m even less prepared for the possibility that I would have to share MY story.
What? Oh yeah, Patrick said somewhere in his first speech that we were free to share as little or as much as we wanted.
But the pressure’s on isn’t it? Ah shit! What the fuck am I going to say when the man to my right passes that fucking stick to me? Damn! I better make this good. I’d like to say something profound and relevant. But how the hell am I supposed to know what’s relevant to a bunch of strange guys?
Ah hell, maybe I’ll come up with something if I listen really hard.
Alright! Now I cross my legs, put my elbows on my knees and listen to the next guy. And I listen to the portly gentleman with the receding hairline that follows. And I listen to the young guy with the buzz cut and the green cargo shorts after that. Then I listen to the really tall guy with the long brown hair and the glasses that look a lot like mine do. And what strikes me about the stories I hear from each man is that everyone seems to be encountering demons from their pasts, and everyone seems to be trying to reconcile themselves with where they’ve been, and where they are at this very moment. Most are looking for some sense of reassurance that they’re not crazy, that they’re normal men trying to fit into an abnormal world.
But somehow, I find myself thinking the exact opposite of myself. I think I’m an abnormal man who’s been trying, for most of his time on this earth, to function as though he was normal. It’s a thought that cuts through my heart like a jagged shard of ice. Fuck, why did I come here? Is this just going to be some other confirmation that I’m some kind of freak who can’t get his ducks in a row?
By the time the talking stick finds its way to the man directly to my right, my heart feels as though it’s going to jump out of my throat and run pell mell from the room. I force myself to focus on the shape and form of the stick, but to me, right now, it looks like a regular old stick. It might as well be a hot poker for all the desire I have to hold it.
But then the man to my right has finished speaking. His speech was all too short, though somehow illuminating all the same. He’s spoken about taking more time to listen to his own heart and to live in the moment. And now the man is reaching out his hand to me, and in his hand is my life. My moment. My talking stick.
And I have no idea what the hell I’m going to talk about.
Being the last member of a circle full of men to receive the talking stick is in my mind more daunting than being the first to speak. The first to speak among a series of people seems to set the mood, and it’s something I’ve come to know in my own mind as setting an emotional precedent. Every speaker that comes after the first one adds their own story with their own words, but those stories often echo the emotions of the first speaker in ways of which the other storytellers are not always aware. The last person is given the task of completing the chain of thought, the series of stories, and in his or her story will be the echo of all the emotions of the previous stories. It seems to me an immense, and sometimes, unfair responsibility when I’m the one who ends up speaking last in these situations.
And it seems I’ve always felt this way. I felt this way when I was the last to give a book report in front of my entire High school freshman English class. I felt this way again when I was forced to go to those fucking “leadership development” retreats in high school and told that, as a brainiac, it was my job to work in groups with other brainiacs to solve imaginary problems that I didn’t give a shit about. I continued to feel this way when I would talk to my old summer camp friends during New Years Eve parties in Scarsdale, NY, and I would find myself feeling embarrassed to be the last to offer a comment or a suggestion in front of the prettiest girl in the room. And when I went to that Winter Which Camp five years ago and our group members would check in with the group one by one each and every time the group met, I hated being the last one to speak
I felt this way and a hell of a lot worse when I spoke at my great grandmother’s funeral years ago, and it was at that moment when I began to wonder if the problem was me.
But that doesn’t matter now, in this room with these other men, does it? How am I going to speak now, and how do I do it with the slightest bit of originality? Haven’t all the good, relevant points been taken tonight? It’s like being passed an apple core after everyone else has cut of their share of the biggest, juiciest apple in the world and eaten it. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this, you jerks?
“Four score and seven years ago, our forefather’s brought forth to this continent a new nation.”
“We the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect Union,..”
“I’d like to thank the academy, and all the beautiful people that have supported me this year...”
My mind is now tumbling, lightning speed, through all the speeches I’ve either heard or read over years. What is it that I thought I would find in these old and useless words? Comedy? Inspiration? A chance to make myself look like an idiot?
Shit.
“Hey, all. Uh, my name is Angel. I’m new and I’m nervous.”
And then it all somehow comes tumbling out of my mouth, which has gone slightly dry.
“I’ve not lived in Portland for long. I’ve not got a job at the moment, and I’m nervous as hell about it. I’m young and I don’t know what to do with my life. I feel old though because I’ve been battling demons for much of my short life on this planet. I’m scared of a lot of things right now, and I hope that that feeling doesn’t last too much longer.
I want to play my drum. Aho.”
OK. Actually, it was a much longer and sort of circular speech than that, cause that’s how my mind really works when I’m nervous. Yet bit by bit, I step out of my own shell and I actually share myself with the other six men in the room. Nobody rolls their eyes or says anything negative. A couple of them even laugh sympathetically. This is a friendly group of men after all, and I’ve now added my voice and my story to their voices and their stories.
I finish my speech and I pass the stick over to Patrick, who thanks me and holds the stick for the last time in circle that night. He speaks a little more about the drums and other musical instruments available to us all tonight, and then he winks and nods to everyone in the room, a twinkle coming to his eyes.
“You’re it, men. Let’s play.”