Lessons

When I was a kid, about seven years old, my Mom gave me two choices, regarding my after-school entertainment. “Music lessons or a swim coach?” Without hesitation (as I remember it), I asked for music lessons. My thinking was, a person can’t breathe under water, which is where I spent most of my time at the cottage or on our family’s marathon camping expeditions. Playing an instrument didn’t put a person in respiratory peril and being able to play an instrument would have been handy around a campfire. What good was swimming after the suit was hung to dry? But, what did I know? And there never really was a choice, as it turned out. My older sisters wanted Mom to hire a swim coach and, a swim coach it was. Two against one.

So the poor sot, Mr. Corcoran, met us three times a week at the John Innes Pool and put us through our paces. If there happened to be an upcoming competition , swimming those freaking timed laps, four and five times a week, was the norm. After months of swimming lessons I took on the smell of chlorine. I sweated chlorine. If I spent too much time in the pool, I barfed chlorine and I had chlorine eyes. “Goggles caused drag.” Or, so I was told. Mom said the smell of pool was better than smelling like a dirty sneaker and red eyes never killed anyone. I suppose it was okay to smell like a chemical plant and look like an alien, but even my sneakers reeked of “pool.” My fingers were always wrinkly and I had bathingcap hair, which may explain the hair I deal with today. I wore a fashionable, scratchy blue woollen and silk tank suit under my school uniform most of the week to save time dressing at the pool.

At recess one day, I remember my best friend, Patty Colville, asking why I smelled like bleach. Geez, music lessons didn’t make you smell. I tried everything to get out of my dates with the race coach and even pointed out to Mom that the local music teacher lived at number 26, practically across the street from us at number 57. I wouldn’t have to spend an hour in the car going to and from the pool, I could just grab my music book and cross the street. But Mom wasn’t about to “buy a piano, or any other instrument, for one kid.” End of the discussion.

By the time I was in grade 10, I didn’t “need” a coach anymore. The high school I attended had a pool and three times each week our physical education class was held in the drink. I might have checked “music” on my “option sheet” when I got to high school, but freestyle or backstroke weren’t musical instruments. The music teacher didn’t care how fast I was in a relay or how smooth my turns were. Heck, it didn’t matter anyway; at 14 I couldn’t read music. I didn’t know a treble clef from a chord.

My Mom, who had years of music lessons, insisted I wasn’t really missing anything because if push came to shove on a sinking ship, I’d be able to swim to shore while my friends tried to make a flutterboard out of their music books. Moms, eh? However, the urge to learn how to play an instrument never went away. When the time came, my much younger brothers did manage to squeeze music lessons out of Mom’s “enrich the child” budget. I wasn’t bitter but I only got to sit on the sidelines while the brothers jammed and all I could do was tap my foot or hum off-key. Guess I could have done “the swim.”

So, here I am, decades after “the choices” were offered and I’m the one making the choices for me. Over the years LOML and I have been together, I’ve told him the “swim coach story” more often than I can recall. He always nods and tells me it’s never too late to learn to play an instrument and I remind him I’m not able to read music and I didn’t want to be bound to a schedule of music lessons.

And then it happened. I had a moment. It wasn’t about being bound to a lesson schedule, it was a fear of failure. I didn’t want to fail at “music lessons” and maybe, just maybe I figured I was a bit too old. Yup, I was afraid to get started. As luck would have it, a wonderful documentary The Mighty Uke aired recently and I was overwhelmed with the urge to learn some new tricks. Aha! Why not just buy an instrument, something simple, find a music book for beginners and get cracking? Well, why not? No wet bathing suits. No bathing-cap hair. No stink of chlorine. No seemingly endless timed laps and perfect turns. And, certainly, no need to cross the road to sit in old lady Baxter’s front room and plink away at her piano. I bought myself a ukulele. Yes, I did. And, I’ve got the perfect teacher. LOML has been playing guitar for as long as I’ve known him; who better? Right. Am I right? C, C, C, pause, C, C, C, switch.

Go ahead and have a laugh, but I can swim circles around most people and if push comes to shove on a sinking ship, I’ll be the first one on shore and I’m going to use my ukulele as a flutter board!!

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca