Trumpet

“It’s time,” he said.  “I’ve had it long enough.”  My father motioned to his trumpet case sitting in the middle of our living room floor.  “I turned 50 this week, and I haven’t played in years.”  He was right. In truth, I only had very vague memories from when I was a young kid of him raising the trumpet up to his lips and holding it skyward as his fingers pressed keys and loud jazz music came tumbling out.  The sounds seemed to enclose me and at the same moment make me feel giddily free.  In high school and college he had played in bands, mainly dance bands, and then for a few years was the leader of two of them.  He played off and on since then, but by 1977 it had been many years.  “It needs to be heard,” he said to me, and then continued,  “The instrument isn’t meant to sit in a closet idle—it needs to be shined up and be taken care of and make sounds.  It was created to make music, not live in darkness.”  Later, after a local man stopped by in the evening and, frayed hat in his shaking hands and a bit of cracking in his voice, thanked my father for this gift,  and left, I became sentimental.  “Daddy, how can you just do that?  How can you gladly give up something that valuable to you?”  “Well,” he began, “I guess it depends on what you call ‘valuable’.  See, I love music.  Love it with all my heart, but that trumpet sitting in a case isn’t music.  It needs to do what it was meant to do—make music. That’s when it becomes gold.”  More than twenty years later, I fully understood. I learned that the man who had come to the house had a  teen-age son who loved playing but the family could not afford a trumpet so he borrowed one whenever he could.  My dad heard about him from a friend.  Once the boy had my dad’s trumpet in his hands, and realized it was fully his own, he hardly let it go—took it with him everywhere.  It helped him get a scholarship to college which gave him openings into a career he dearly loved.  I learned this after my father died when I got a long condolence letter with an enclosed photo from the boy—now man—my dad had given the trumpet to.  He wrote of how that simple gesture taught him a lot about life and people and the meaning of generosity.  “It really comes down to being willing to give parts of yourself to others—Your dad gave me the gift of his music and the gift of learning I could make my own.  And, see, my son Jason is next.”  The photo:  A young boy—maybe 9 or 10— holding a gleaming, giant-seeming golden trumpet in his small hands, grinning widely, with my dad’s beaten-up instrument case proudly set up right beside him.

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