“Pay attention maggot! We ain’t at girl scout camp ‘ny more. Get your head in the game. Move those hands! You call that drumming!?”
Okay so maybe his voice wasn’t synonymous with that drill sergeant from Saving Private Ryan. And maybe he didn’t go around calling all of us “maggots”, but in my mind, our drum instructor was a drill sergeant one and the same.
The butt of the stick clinked loudly against the marble floor, reverberating and breaking the silence, and breaking my reverie. I hadn’t felt the smooth wood slip from my fingers, but it brought me to the realization, that I’d been sitting there unproductively for the last few minutes, caught up in my thoughts.
I sighed, and resigned to following the drumstick that was currently rolling noisily down the stairs. Bending down to catch it, I weighed the identical sticks in my hands and realized my hands felt awkward and heavy. The music I was producing with them lately reflected that pretty exactly.
Ahhh. I sighed again. What was the point? Why should I even care enough to practice? What was he going to do to me? But honestly, my drill sergeant scared me, so I looked at the drum and decided to try just one more time, so I could at least honestly say I made an attempt.
I looked at the drum, placing the untouched pearly white sticks on top of it, and pointed my hands toward the drum, trying the music one more time. A long string of notes shot out. I hadn’t tried very hard and the product clearly showed. Music was supposed to be beautiful, life-giving. Though what I had played just now sounded more like a myriad of broken cantaloupes clumsily crashing down a rusted stairwell only to splat at the bottom.
Then I opened my eyes, making me realize that I’d squeezed them shut. I looked up into the mirror in front of me, and realized my shoulders were scrunched back in tension. I looked like the drum was about to eat me. My imagination took off at the thought, bringing the drum’s black top to life. The shining silver rim becoming rows of menacing pointed teeth, and the black drumhead (the surface you play on) becoming an endless abyss about to swallow m…”
His voice, loud and annoyed, reemerged back to the surface of my thoughts, cutting off my imaginative detour.
“What was that?! That was the worst piece of drumming I’ve heard in my entire life. You look like some amateur pounding away on his bongos on some street in San Francisco…”
Oh my god! Ok, I get it!! Could the voices just stop? Why couldn’t they just relent and leave me in peace? Frustrated and irritated, I glanced at the drum once more, and in a final act of defiance, slammed the sticks down on top of it, stood up, and walked away.
There! I did it. It was that simple. I dismissed him and the voices were gone. I smiled triumphantly, realizing only a few moments later, how stupid I felt, stopped halfway down my hall, grinning smugly to myself. If I accomplished what I wanted, why didn’t I feel happy or proud of myself? Giving up was so easy. That I’d learned through experience. It made things so simple, so easy, so…
“much more boring, so disappointing, so unfulfilling, so meaningless…”
His voice came back, but this time it was quieter and softer, until I realized that it was morphing into my own voice; but the words, the concepts were the same.
“Turn around. Sit down, and focus. You have the makings of a great snare player, but that can’t happen by yourself. Find that discipline and structure it in yourself to follow through and complete what you started.”
Hmmn I guess he, well I made a good point. I already knew what it felt like to fail, to capitulate to my inner laziness. I’d done it so many times before; gymnastics, painting, softball, basketball, karate, running, acting, volleyball…you name it, I did it- well at least for one year, until I made a fit about the practicing and then quit.
When the going gets tough, you drop it all and quit! … But that wasn’t the saying. That was when I was six years old. It’s time to change.
Turning my body to look back at the drum, standing solely in the front of the mirror at the end of the hallway, I began striding purposefully back towards it. Picking the sticks back up from the drumhead, I sat down. This time, I sat up straight, shoulders back, eyes open and looking straight ahead.
I sat there three more hours, drumming long into my Sunday night, erasing any chance of a social life.
Next morning, I walked into the drum room, and stationed myself proudly in front of my drum. My drum instructor walked in, his hair disheveled, and his eyes groggy from the strain of coming to our 0 period class at 7 am, much less the wild dictator of my imagination.
“Alright then, everyone stop talking. Down the line. Raime, first. Play it right and don’t screw up”, he called out, taking a survey of the room, and listening as the dull murmurs of the people slowly subsided.
I let out a deep breath, and realized they were all sitting down, distractedly, expecting me to blunder and fail. I moved my hands, mimicking the motions, I’d repeat three hours the night before. I heard the music and listened as each note fell into its own correct place, and slowly in my head, I heard where the rest of the drumline fit in with my music. I heard the base, the groove, the beat, and it felt right for once.
As I stood strongly in front of my drum in the pure stunned silence that followed, I felt a smile creeping up my cheeks, and silently I thanked my inner drill sergeant for helping me get back on track, and finding that confidence within myself.