#fourthgrade
Instrumentation selection
Was a big step in our lives
Choices made in fourth grade
Would stay with us through school
To the end
If we stayed in band
So many choices
Brass or woodwind
Big or small
Loud or louder
Percussion as an option too
What would be the perfect fit
Did we take advice from mom or dad
And play the instrument that they played
Or maybe a brother or sister
Or one of their cool friends
A lot of impressions molded
Our decision on the path that we went down.
I selected, with a few of my friends,
The long and shiny brass trombone
Touchy slide that perfecting
Lubrication with silicone proved tricky
And dumping the spit from the valve
Proved essential and gross.
It took years to become adequate
Enough that the notes flowed like spit
All the way through my senior year
Until I put the parts away in the black case
That one last time then sold it
To the parents of a fourth grader.
Jun 2, 2019
Jun 2, 2019 at 5:14 PM UTC
On the paint chipped pavement we went over the rules:
NO cherry bombs, NO bobbling,
NO lower-ballers, spin-tops,
chalk walkers, twenty fingers,
and especially NO skyscrapers.
So for a few minutes we played as raw as apple skin knees,
it was the roughest, toughest, hard-nosed game
of four square any fourth grader has ever seen.
But it was all over when someone crossed the line.
There was fussing, cussing, and an accusation of the mustnt’s.
Eyebrows adjacent, we argued and clawed like kilkenny cats,
we were breaking rules, we crossed the chalk.
We took sides and worst of all,
the one crucial act that we regret,
we slammed the ball down.
It towered overhead like window washers
and landed on the school’s roof.
We stopped arguing. Nobody won that day.
© Matthew Harlovic
Oct 28, 2014
Oct 28, 2014 at 9:29 PM UTC