community band

I like when I can send out feelers of wryness and they are caught. Do you catch the twinkle in my eye? Wink wink nudge back? So much better that than waiting until I say I'M JOKING. So much better to be sitting beside a man fifty years my senior with a clarinet between his knobbled hands and to tease the tubas together and to catch him smiling when the dog barks along with the Star-Spangled Banner than to be smirking down my reed alone. Where I sat in the band before we used to call the 'dell' --the oboes in the dell-- sitting in my chair like the nipple in a breast of flutes. But now the seating has shifted and our curves have straightened, and I'm off to one edge, which is fine, and it's especially fine to be sitting next to a man who might in another life have been my grandfather and if so I would have liked to inherit his easy grin.