WHY NOT A PICCOLO?

For more than a decade I have ended my workday with carpool duty.  Carpool is NOT an entertaining place to be when temperatures dip below freezing, when the rain is driving sideways with gusto, or when the wind is impolitely and forcefully turning my umbrella inside out.

But in the recent beautiful sunshine of an October day, it was exactly where I wanted to be. Allow me to explain.



photo credit Courtney Reynolds

Holly Lewis (parent of one of our sixth grade students) was sitting patiently in the carpool line.  She was dutifully following carpool procedures by inching her car down the hill while she waited for her son to emerge from the building.  

She was almost to the bottom of the hill when she and I finally spotted Ethan. Our eyes were drawn immediately to the ginormous black instrument case with which he struggled.  He was attempting to direct the weight of the case onto two puny wheels which could only have been teasingly installed by the case manufacturer.  He was smiling broadly and when I glanced to my right to measure his mother’s reaction, she was wearing a face of sheer disbelief. 

“The instruments he brings home are getting bigger and BIGGER!”  Apparently, this was the third instrument in just three weeks. First it was a trumpet.  A baritone came next. And now, this unexpected monstrosity… I jokingly remarked that I believed the object precariously rolling toward us might in fact be a TUBA, and to his mother’s dismay, it turns out I was correct! 

Our remarkable band director Shelley Berg is an enthusiastic encourager of students and coworkers.  I see now she is an optimist, too.

The first thing Ethan handed his accommodating mother was a bulky instrument stand.  Her good-humored response: “Anything that requires help from a stand like this is TOO LARGE.”

With combined rigorous effort, Ethan and I barely managed to lift the hefty load to the trunk of his mother’s car.  Once aloft, we pushed and shoved at several rather ridiculous angles until we managed to stuff the cumbersome thing into the trunk at a slant so we could successfully close the door.  It’s a good thing MY children played saxophone, violin and guitar because there is no way that tuba would have ever been transported by ANY of the vehicles at my house without the aid of an automated lift, roof rack and some bungee cords…



The muscle man must have attempted removal on his own since his mother was snapping this photo!

Still grinning, Ethan tried to console his longsuffering mother.  “Mrs. Berg says she is trying to find a smaller one…”

I could barely wait to hear how much Ethan’s mother enjoyed his first practice notes from that mammoth brass beast once they effectively managed to remove it from the trunk…

Oh how we love her, but really Mrs. Berg, why not a piccolo?