Alaina Among The Drums

Sometimes you just need to pick up some sticks and beat something.

I bought Alaina a small electronic drum set for Christmas. It’s not anything fancy, more drum training wheels than anything else. She’ll get a real set soon enough. She’s playing bass in her school orchestra now, but her future is rhythm and percussion. In honor of her next step in drummerhood, I reprint this pre-blog Facebook note from March 13, 2010.
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We spent hours drumming. Or more specifically, she did, that daughter of mine. Her eyes glowing, first wistfully as the store worker insisted he didn’t have extra drumsticks and then passionately as she grabbed the twin sticks and struck the drumheads. And again. Again.

The small one has rhythm, I thought. I’m not sure if she knew it, but she could feel it, stringing together random hits into some sort of beat — it was ragged, a bit confused, but an alive thing, that beat.

We worked our way from the $2,500 electronic drum set to the $900 old-fashioned real life set. She wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave.

She looked around at the keyboards, the guitars. The DJ turntables got just a glance, but that faded when she discovered the needle was broken. Back to the drums, booming away in the electronics store.

It was closing time, or nearly so. She finished up a 91 percent completion rate on “Can’t Buy Me Love” on Rock Band, the Beatles version. It was the third drum set of the night. “Is this our last one?” She asked.

I said yes. She got up. I took her back to the drum section.

Bought two drumsticks, a small practice pad. It rang up to $27.

I took two steps out of the drum section but stopped when I heard her voice.

“Wait…just wait.”

I looked back, down. Our eyes met. Her fists were balled up by her sides. Her eyes were big, and burning with that same passion I had seen all night.

Then she threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around me, in a side hug I didn’t expect.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

I thought of being that age. All those passions I had and dreams of being one thing or another. The reading I would do, the training I would give myself for my future as a deep-sea diver, as a pilot, as a geologist. I remembered thinking that if I could only get my hands on a cheap rock hammer (any old thing would do), I would have the icon, the relic I needed to make my dreams come true.

I held her close. Life hugged us both.

“Hey,” I said. “Sometimes the little things are all you need to make big things happen.”

Then I realized it was true.

Idioms? You Betcha

These are weapons of understanding. Do not underestimate them.

The old lady at the Fargo, North Dakota, thrift store counter looked like a grandma. She wore her glasses with a chain like a grandma, and tucked in her nice white blouse into her tan pants like a grandma.

She quietly folded the shirts I was buying and started to tuck them into a plastic bag, only for it to slide away from her on the counter.

No big deal, right?

Then I realized: I speak her language, fluently.

To me, words are the notes of music in three dimensions. They’re shapes that waver and morph and clinch together again in arcs that dip and soar with the flow of a sentence.

This is why I hate to learn languages. Mind you, I love to use languages. I just hate to learn them, to be a linguistic cripple, to use basic words to ask for inexact things.

I’ve spent more than two-thirds of my life in the north-central US. I was raised on the quirks and twitches of the English used here. I know the accents and phrases and word usages — the flourishes of language that show you’re not a stranger, the little things that speak to hearts and makes locals react almost instinctively.

I didn’t realize how much I missed that knowledge.

Now I’m back. No, really, I’m BACK. I’m swinging idioms left and right, breaking out the clichés and laying down the accent — flattening down consonants, squelching final syllables, and rounding vowels.

The thrift store grandma grabbed for the plastic bag before it fell over the counter’s edge.

Go time.

“We’ll, that’s sure being squirrelly, isn’t it,” I said.

She laughed.

“It sure is,” she said, with a smile.

Squirrelly.

It felt good.

The Telescoped Life

The metal-encased time capsule in my parents' driveway.

It was like a time capsule, this car.

My old Buick, ready and waiting, sat parked outside my parent’s house all summer. Inside was the detritus of somebody’s hurried departure. Mine.

Here were the new-looking receipts for things I had used, well, for three months. Those well-worn things now had well-preserved receipts. Here’s a bag for the clothes I bought back in April. I left those clothes in Yemen, victims of a weight loss massacre.

I was the last to touch this stuff, but I can’t remember it happening. What was I thinking at the exact moment I slammed this plastic bag into the back seat?

This stuff is mine. This car is mine. This seat is my seat, and it’s adjusted for a body, my body.

Yet it’s all so new — all this stuff is the middle part of my telescoped life. I have a bed and a few totes hidden in a friend’s apartment in Kentucky. I have the rest of my worldly belongings in this car. A few items fill the bags I took to Yemen and back.

Here I am, collapsing the telescope, reassembling my life of items.

Maybe soon they’ll feel like mine.

Dutch, Americans, and a Familiar Taxi Driver

The full-body scanner. Yes, it feels about as ridiculous as it looks. (Source: AP)

“Interesting,” said the Dutch security man, fingering my passport and flipping through the papers I had handed him moments before.

“Interesting,” he muttered again as he looked at the receipt for my stay at the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. I thought perhaps the American part of the name would balance out the Yemeni part. I guessed wrong. Apparently the Dutch use the word “interesting” like the rest of us use the words “highly suspicious.”

The Dutch man and I had been talking for about five minutes about who I was, what I was doing in Yemen, and who paid for it.

“Please wait here a moment,” he said, and stepped away to confirm with a more senior security man.

As they conferred, I tried to figure out what to do with my eyes, and finally just watched the passport scanner screen as passenger after passenger was checked in.

The scan of one man’s passport brought up a blinking display on the screen: “This person may be a selectee!” It said, as if he had just won an award.

Then I noticed both security men looking at me looking at the screen, and I looked away. The more senior man stepped up and round 2 of questions began.

How did I pay for the place I stayed? “By getting my own money out of the ATM?” I answered helplessly. His mouth twitched and I’m not sure if he was smiling or frowning.

Did I have anything in my bags that ran on batteries. Um, sure, laptop, camera, cell phone. Wow, I’m an idiot, I thought. They’ll detain me just because of my stupid answers.

Stupid answers, but good enough for him to finally wish me a nice flight and usher me into the full-body scanner prior to boarding the plane.

I was sure I was going to get detained upon arrival in the US. Everyone said so. I watched as the “selectee” from the Amsterdam boarding got a keen eye from the chubby US customs official, who called over the intercom — an invitation for a beefy uniformed man to stride over and ask the “selectee to follow him, sir.

I’m screwed, I thought.

The official looks at my passport, looks at me, then picks up the stamp and drives it home against the customs document.

“Welcome back,” he said.

Leave-leave-walk-now-before-you-say-something-stupid, my brain rattled.

In Fargo, North Dakota, USA, I stumbled off the plane, jet lag blurry, into the arms of family members who had waited an extra hour due to my plane being delayed. They had smiles, and hugs, and welcome home signs.

On the way out of the airport, at the bottom of the last escalator, stood one of my brothers-in-law, holding a sign with my name misspelled.

“Taxi? You need taxi?”

Yeah, I did.

Home, please, and step on it.