I fancy myself an amateur photographer. I'm pretty sure I got the knack for this as a child, studying ants within an inch of my nose, watching them carrying dirt specks, cookie crumbs, and moth wings to and fro. It was great exercise - for my thighs, I mean. I'd squat for hours peering at my insect friends. These were the relatively friendly, large black ants of central Missouri, not the nasty little fire ants that we have here in the south.
Wow, what a segue - photography and perspective to ants and exercise. Some people would call that rambling. I call it efficiency. In truth, my way of looking at things stems from taking interest in observing what I have around me, rather than dreaming about what I haven't got.
So what did you study up close when you were little? I used to dig in the dirt or go rock-hunting in the creek behind our house. The other thing I used to do was to listen to records on our little portable
record player. My favorite was a Pete Seeger record. This was back in the day when we had three stations on our television set, no cable TV, no VCR or DVD player, and
computers were decidedly NOT personal and also were approximately the size of small houses. We didn't have lots of technology to play with. What we did have was TIME.
Some of my earliest musical memories are my Pete Seeger records and the Boone Docs. I was pretty lucky. Although the child of two medical professionals, my parents were also amateur musicians. The Boone Docs were mostly medical professionals who loved music and wanted to play together for fun. My daddy played valve trombone and sousaphone, and my mother played banjo and sang. The plastic surgeon who fixed my broken jaw when I was 2 years old played a truly swingin' clarinet. Dee played drums and Raymond played piano. Perhaps in a future post I'll pay tribute properly and look up their names for you, because I haven't listed them all. More than anything, they were my parents' friends. They would gather in the basement of our house and practice tunes like The Sheik of Araby and Tiptoe Through the Tulips, as well as The Saints Go Marching In and Blackbird, Bye Bye, among others. On practice nights I would tiptoe through the playroom and give a kiss goodnight to my parents and then lie in bed listening to Dixieland jazz as my bedtime lullaby.
My mom would tell you she can't sing, but she would play her banjo and sing Trouble in Mind or Rattler to her four children. I picked up the ability to play banjo by ear by watching her with our family friend,
Mitch Jayne. Mitch was not a member of the Boone Docs; Mitch was one of the original members of the bluegrass group called The Dillards. My Uncle Mitch is worthy of a whole separate post, so you'll just have to be patient with me on that. But a nerdy thing that I'd like to relate to you right now (I told you I'm a nerd) is that even though I have various and asundry degrees and certificates in music, I picked up my ability to sing and play the banjo completely by ear. The funniest thing to me is that I never even
tried to figure out the true pitches on my banjo until a year or two ago. Just recently I was able to sing Pete Seeger's version of My Little Rooster from memory, but I honestly haven't thought about his version of that song since about 1971. Some people learn everything by memorizing it. My sister tells me this is the reason that she remembers every note of our high school marching band drum cadence, and I don't. I've never thought I had a good memory, but I guess I actually do. The thing is, I haven't relied on it or even really thought about it since I learned to read music, sometime around ...1971.
So - what was your childhood perspective? Future scientist? Future artist? What are some of your earliest memories? Surely I haven't been the only ant-observing rock collector on the planet...
