Life's little lessons

What is it with us old people and this desire we have to pass on life lessons to the young?

I'm in my seventieth year. I don't have to stretch the definition of "old" to qualify as a member of the class. Wisdom? I'm not claiming a bit of it. I can promise you that wisdom in no way piles up as the years accumulate. Experience? That does pile up -- the good and the bad.

I say this as preamble to the first in a series of occasional posts that are aimed at the young ones in the family. My experience has taught me that certain roads taken in my youth turned out to have a profound impact on my life.

For the most part, this will probably be an exercise in futility.

Why? Because, dear reader, it's futile to try to influence another's life. Just as trying to teach a pig to sing wastes your time and annoys the hell out of the pig.

Nevertheless ...

Music will bring you joy in unexpected ways.

I began to learn that lesson in, I believe, 2nd grade. I was introduced to the tonette.

Tonettes are cheap, plastic wind instruments. The fingering is simple, and they are easy to play. They were incorporated into American classrooms in the late 1930s as a pre-band or -orchestra instrument. I think the first song we learned to play in the late 1940s was "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." At first, we must have created a disagreeable and discordant sound.

But we learned to play the thing, some of us better than others. A year later we learned the rudiments of playing an autoharp. By 5th grade, I was taking violin lessons from the visiting music teacher at Helen Dickinson Elementary. Still later, at East End Junior High in Richmond, I took up the bass fiddle and played in the school's orchestra.

I stopped playing music in high school. There was no orchestra at Henrico's Hermitage High School. (Instead, there was a marching band. Bass fiddles just don't work well in a marching band.)

So what part did the tonette, the autoharp, the violin and the bass fiddle play in my life?

They taught me about rhythm -- from the rhythm of rock and roll music to the rhythm of Bach and Beethoven and on to the unusual rhythms of Dave Brubeck's music.

They taught me to hear and appreciate the rhythm of the falling rain, the rhythm of a horse's hoofbeats and the rhythm of slow dancing when the lights are low.

I learned to hear the rhythm of verbal expression, the cadence of writers from Shakespeare to Harper Lee, the simple, throbbing beauty of a perfect sentence.

Even today, I feel life's rhythms deep in my bones.

The rhythm of music learned early and embedded acutely in one's brain will emerge at some point, often in a way utterly unrelated to music.

I, for example, became a writer.