Yesterday I went into the kitchen and found my son, Porter, wearing a hoodie, which is uncharacteristic, and making a delicious lunch, which is not. “Nice hoodie,” I said.

“I’m going through an edgy teenager phase. Want some salad? It’s avocado ranch.”

He’s seventeen, so I was wondering when we’d get to the edgy teenager bit. Apparently, April 18^th is as good a day as any, though I’m uncertain whether a white hoodie emblazoned with his choir logo will gain him entrée into the ‘hood.

Porter is the most musical of all of us. When he was a baby in his little infant swing, he happened to be sitting behind my sister, Shara, as she was playing the piano, and she heard him “singing” along, getting the intervals correct before he was even close to crawling. I introduced piano lessons in kindergarten, which all my kids greeted with the buoyant joy of a moldy sandwich, but I gamely soldiered on, applying their backsides to the piano bench, setting the timer for practices, and calling out the mother’s curse. “If you don’t practice, someday you’ll regret it!” I know the curse works because my mom cast it on me, and I regret it to this day.

Unfortunately, when we moved to China, we couldn’t find a teacher, and we’ve established I’m the lame duck with many regrets, so I was no help. Back then the kids didn’t even try to hide their glee as their lessons crumbled away, but time has passed and my son, Chase, has figured out that chicks dig boys that can play, prompting a renaissance at the piano bench that came to light when he arrived home from college for Christmas. Knowing nothing of Chase’s change of heart, Porter had begun pushing for a piano teacher on his own, and was happy as a clam when my Aunt Laura graciously took him on. I don’t regret starting them young because it cracked open a portal of sorts, though they didn’t fully kick it wide until years later. As children practicing was uphill both ways in deep snow, but as teenagers, they play for themselves far longer than I would have ever dared require.

Porter has also been learning what he can on YouTube, which led him to collect an array of funky little instruments such as a melodica, otamatone, mouth harp, and kalimba. Of course, there are also the usual suspects such as the ukulele we got him in Thailand, that initially alerted him to the existence of casual instruments. At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown he ordered his first recorder, which I hadn’t realized was once a serious instrument, collected by the likes of Henry VIII who had seventy more recorders than wives, which is saying something. With centuries of fans, naturally there has been a great body of music composed for it. It was twentieth-century German composer Carl Orff, creator of Carmina Burana, who decided it was a perfect gateway instrument for children, and essentially sacrificed its classical reputation on the altar of grade school education. Thanks to Orff our views of the recorder have morphed so drastically since old Henry and his merry band of executioners that when Porter’s recorder arrived, the packaging stated in bold print “This Is Not A Toy.” Read More