Choices

November 4, 2008

Fiction, we're told, is all about choices.

So is life. Last night we went to my son's high school band concert. All three high school bands, the Varsity, Concert, and Symphonic bands played and they were all good (actually, the top band, the Symphonic, was a lot better than good).

When I was in high school, I was a big music guy. I played saxophone in the symphonic band and jazz band and in the orchestra, where I also played bells when the percussionists needed an extra set of hands. I played piano and I taught both piano and saxophone. Most people assumed I'd be a music major and when I went and majored first in medical technology and then microbiology, most people were surprised.

It wasn't a good decision and the reasoning behind the choices were complicated, but let's just say that my brother had been a music major (and, in fact, was getting his PhD--or more precisely, DMA, which is Doctorate of Musical Arts--in music theory and composition at the University of Texas at the same time I was getting my BS in microbiology and public health at Michigan State University) and my mother in particular was wildly opposed to this and I got exposed to that for 6 years prior to going off to college.

As you know, I discovered I really wanted to be a writer about 4 years later and we know how that story ended.

Anyway, when my oldest son started marching band in high school this year (he's also in jazz band and in concert band and he plays guitar, in fact, he plays bassoon, guitar and saxophone), my wife and I got involved in the band boosters and we both chaperoned a night at the marching band camp. Leanne asked me why I didn't major in music and become a high school band director. Part of it was Mom, certainly; part of it was that in high school I was much more interested in piano than sax and didn't really think I wanted to spend the rest of my career teaching kids piano from 4:00 in the afternoon to 10:00 at night with all day Saturday and probably do church organ or something similar on the weekends. There's some irony in this because, after all, I do spend most of my day in a small room, only by myself.

Last night, we picked up our youngest son at the pool where he's in swim club and walked through the high school to the auditorium for the concert and I suddenly had another thought. I told Leanne: "Actually, another reason I didn't major in music was I was so eager to get away from high school that I couldn't imagine spending my whole career working in a high school."

That's definitely true. However, I would point out that I probably would have really enjoyed being a high school band director.

So we make a lot of choices, for better or worse, and sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't, and sometimes the ship manages to steer itself back toward its true direction. That's how I feel about being a writer, actually. That I majored in science and took science jobs because someone else was steering the ship, but the ship kept wanting to go back on a different heading. And I finally yanked the controls away and let the ship get back to the direction it needed to go.

Anyway, here's the first movement of a symphony the Symphonic Band played last night (different band, same piece), called "The Divine Comedy."

Cheers,
Mark Terry