A Long Time Hobby: Music

[technomom]

Originally published at Enemy of Entropy. You can comment here or there.

First, a ran­dom thought:
“Don’t lis­ten to any­one who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s non­sense. Make up your mind,…then have a go at every­thing. Go to school,… Go any­where you want to. But never, never let them per­suade you that things are too dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble.” Dou­glas Bader (1910 - 1982), British fighter pilot and WWII hero, despite hav­ing lost both legs in 1931
And now, the actual content:
Plinky asked, Which of your hob­bies have you been doing for the longest amount of time? When did you start?”


Music (232÷365)

That would be music. I’ve been singing since I was a small child in church choir. The way my mother’s fam­ily makes music, I could hardly avoid it (not that I wanted to). I learned to play the ukulele with the rest of my sec­ond grade class, but held on to my instru­ment and kept play­ing it for some time. I began piano lessons in the fifth grade, I think, and con­tin­ued for a cou­ple of years and through three teach­ers (we moved, one quit, and I out­grew the last). The flute came with sixth grade and mid­dle school band.

At some point my par­ents acquired an organ in addi­tion to the piano and I taught myself to play that, which was inter­est­ing. In high school I flirted with the oboe and bas­soon, but didn’t really take to them very well. I gave them up alto­gether after read­ing some­thing that claimed that dou­ble reed play­ers suf­fered loss of brain cells due to oxy­gen depri­va­tion (I haven’t fact-​​checked that since, so it could be utter non­sense). I acquired a wooden flute at a Renn Faire that has a much sweeter tone than the metal flute, but I’ve never pushed myself to really learn to play it.

Now I want to return to the ukulele, but I really need a new instru­ment. That poor lit­tle stu­dent uke that has been used as a “gui­tar” by chil­dren isn’t in per­fect con­di­tion after all these years, and won’t stay in tune in addi­tion to hav­ing some bro­ken bits.