On Remembering One's Childhood and Playing the Snare Drum

It always amazes me when someone remembers enough about their childhood to discuss it in real detail. Lately I’ve been reading Angela Thirkell’s architecture-memoir Three Houses, which is full of lovely details about staircases and neighbors and people’s full names and has sentences like, “Those were the days when the Dover Coach Road still ran to the south of Welfare’s Green and the miller was living in his little house below the great sails of the windmill and the winter storms brought strange cargoes to Rottingdean beach.”

My recollection of my own childhood runs along more Impressionist lines – I’m fairly certain I was there, of course, and I have a general sense of the most frequently-recurring characters, and sometimes it was in California and sometimes it was in Illinois, and there’s a certain particolored sweater I wore to the Rainforest Café because I thought it matched the decor, but I couldn’t swear to much more than that. I couldn’t tell you where anybody lived, or the last names of most of my friends, or what kind of car we drove, or what time I went to bed or anything. To this day I couldn’t tell you what road runs south of me now, and I respond with baffled hostility whenever anyone tries to guide me along cardinal directions, like “Let’s meet at the southwest corner of ____ and _____.” You might as well say to me “Let’s meet at

I remember hating a young man named Nick C. in the second grade for saying “What’s up?” to me, waiting for my reply, then answering “Chicken butt,” which offended my dignity and resulted in several parent-teacher conferences, but after that it’s fairly opaque until about fifth or sixth grade, when I believe I joined the school band.

If my memory serves, and I’m not at all sure that it does, the school band (I do remember the name of the school, Thomas Jefferson Elementary, because our music teacher changed the lyrics to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from “You’ll go down in his-tor-ee” to “You’ll go down in his-tor-ee/Like Tho-mas Jeff-er-son” for the annual Christmas concert) had between two and five musicians for each instrument except for the snare drum. There were fifteen of us. I don’t know why. They ought to have put a cap after eight, but they didn’t. As far as Thomas Jefferson Elementary was concerned, any fifth-grader who wanted to play the snare drum was going to get a snare drum, and no powers or principalities on Earth were going to stand in their way. Even fifteen excellent snare drummers are apt to sound a little crowded, however, and none of us were excellent, which meant that every song the school band played had at least one drummer drumming on every single note at any given time. We had to practice in batches of three or four at a time, since the rehearsal room wasn’t big enough for our august body, and again if memory serves (although why would it?) I was paired off with Jonathan O. and my friend Jenny J., although at the time she and I were both experimenting with the spelling of our first names, so she would have been going by Jeni and I by Malory (one L) at the time.

I don’t believe I was either better or worse than the other drummers in the band. I had a reasonable eye for musical notation, and a decent ear for rhythm, but I got flustered easily and once I lost my place I found it difficult to catch up. It was very easy to lose one’s place among fifteen uncertain ten-year-olds (is that how old fifth graders are? I no longer remember); like Jude Fawley’s children, we were too menny. At this point the cumbersome size of the band became a refuge, and I could bang indiscriminately on the drum at my leisure, no longer worrying about the beats I was supposed to hit since everyone was banging on every beat anyway.

At some point in sixth grade, either the music teacher (Ms. Jahnke) or the band director (Mr. Benson, incidentally my next-door neighbor, although I received no special treatment as a result – either I remember more of my childhood than I thought, or this single story contains the bulk of what I remember from the first eighteen years of life) decided to send representatives from each section of the school band to address the kindergarten music class and encourage them to try out for the band when they were old enough. I don’t know if I was marked out as the sole representative, or if each of the snare drummers was sent out as Childe Roland to a unique batch of kindergarteners. All I know is that one day I was sent out from class, or rehearsal, or somewhere I was supposed to be, to drum a little number in front of a sea of five-year-olds and inspire them to pick up sticks themselves.

I wonder if you have ever had to set up a snare drum kit in front of a group of kindergarteners? As I say, my memory of the procedure is inexact, but it involved a fair amount of unsnapping the metal legs and twisting what seemed like a half-dozen tension rods and tube lugs, all under the baleful eyes of a thousand infants, most of whom had yet to master breathing quietly through the nostrils and still gasped like fish on every third word. I realize now that they would not have been able to tell the difference between a masterfully-struck snare drum solo and a bad one. I could have flailed away for thirty seconds, declared the song over, and no one but Ms. Jahnke would have been the wiser, but I had not yet mastered the art of smoothing-over, and believed myself honor-bound to execute a flawless rendition of Bayou Breakdown.

I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to perform badly, and playing Bayou Breakdown correctly seemed equally impossible. Nor could I imagine stopping and starting over, ordinarily my favorite rehearsal technique, and so I took the only option I saw available to me:

Standing perfectly still, on a perfectly level carpeted floor, and in full view of everyone who had just watched me set up my drum kit without complication, I announced that I had just hurt my ankle, very badly indeed, and would not be able to play Bayou Breakdown that day, although my dearest wish had always been to play Bayou Breakdown for them, even if I died in the attempt, and now I must immediately hobble off to the nurse’s office to get my ankle set. Incredibly, I was given permission to do so, even though Ms. Jahnke had insurmountable visual evidence that there was nothing in the world wrong with my ankle. It was the baldest lie I had ever told (outside of the toddler years, I mean, where children regularly offer outrageous assertions like “I’ve just eaten the sun” without batting an eye), and I had no business telling it, and it worked beautifully.

I could scarcely believe my luck. I was never asked to repeat the performance – the nurse humored me for the rest of the period – no one ever tried to follow up with me – my fellow fifth-graders never learned I’d faked an injury to escape music enrichment, so I was never censured for cowardice under fire – to this day, it’s the cleanest escape I’ve ever made. I suppose that’s why it’s one of the few anecdotes from my childhood I remember in vivid detail, and in that sense I suppose the escape wasn’t very clean at all. And I did end up breaking my right ankle several times in my twenties, before I got sober, such that my right ankle still clicks whenever I rotate my foot, because God punishes the wicked.

I should mention that I quit the school band upon middle school, because that’s when all-band practice was moved from after class got out from the day to before classes started in the morning, and I drew the line at playing the Light Cavalry Overture before sunrise. A man’s got to have a code.