The Cornet

There was something special about musical instruments in our house when I was a small boy growing up in a small town.  There was the piano of course, but my mother had a large red and white accordion as well that hung from the shoulders by wide leather straps and weighed about as much as I did.  My father had a cornet that lived in a copper-colored hard plastic case lined with faux fur and smelled of old valve oil.  It was like a toddler version of the trumpet: smaller, chubbier, and with a warmer sound than its flashier cousin.  

The accordion had a keyboard on one side and a panel of buttons on the other separated by pleated bellows in between.  One button in particular fascinated me as it had what appeared to be a diamond imbedded in it.  The cornet was an exquisite contraption in its own right with golden tubes looping in on themselves ending in a shiny bell.  I loved watching my mother hoist that accordion, unsnap the bellows, and start pushing and pulling to get music flowing from it while my father hooked his pinky finger into a ring on the cornet to anchor his playing hand and flutter the valves to warm them up.

And there were so many buttons!  How did she know which ones to push and when?  If she pushed one down several others would depress simultaneously as if she had an invisible assistant.  If my parents were playing together the accordion would supply an intro for the song while my father waited with cornet in hand working the valves to make sure they weren’t sticking.  At just the right moment he would lift that sculpted piece of brass up to his mouth and purse his lips as if to kiss it.

Sometimes the first note was a little sketchy, but he would quickly recover as his lips found their proper place in the mouthpiece and the warm air began to flow more steadily.  It was a kind of magic to hear them make music together with Mom laying out all the harmonic lines and Dad soloing the melody over top with some flourishes here and there to add some spice.  At other times they would sing a duet in church with just the accordion providing accompaniment and Mom singing alto.  It wasn’t until our teen years that us kids sometimes got into the mix allowing for three or four-part harmony within the family.  

So, when the opportunity arose to join band in the sixth grade it was a no-brainer that I would do so and play the cornet.  That summer before sixth grade the band director had Saturday morning classes at the high school to introduce students to the instrument of their choice.  For trumpet it was me and two of my classmates learning first how to buzz our lips, loose then tight, to find that low C and then the mid-range C without having to push down any of the three finger buttons.  I was a long way away from those flourishes I’d heard my Dad make on his romping rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers” but I was excited nonetheless to be holding the cornet itself and making sounds come out of it.

There is one day that sticks out from the others that summer when I was 10 years old.  I would ride my bike up Second Street to the high school for these lessons while trying to balance the cornet case on the bar between my legs using only one hand.  It was very awkward and my neighborhood was at the extreme south end of Second Street and the high school was at the extreme north end which measured out the entire length of our town.  That day I got the idea to put the cornet in my backpack and leave the bulky case at home without asking my parent's permission.

Well, as luck would have it, I was less than a block from the high school when my right handle bar clipped the side mirror of a truck parked on the street that was sticking out over the sidewalk.  That sent me sprawling, hitting my head on the cement, and rolling over into the grass of someone’s yard.  I was somewhat dazed, but immediately thought of the cornet and pulled it out of the backpack to find I had dented the bell.  Despite the fact blood was starting to trickle down my forehead I was distraught about damaging the cornet and wondering what kind of trouble I would be in when I got home.

I sat in that yard in a kind of despair with a nauseous feeling in my stomach and some tears trying to work their way up into my eyes.  The blood was starting to flow a good bit more from my head but all I could think about was the cornet.  I finally took a deep breath and pulled myself up off the ground to retrieve my bike and continue up the hill to the high school.  There I ran into one of the other students who was being dropped off by his dad in a pickup truck.  His dad took one look at me and got out of the truck and sent his son into the school to get some paper towels from the bathroom to press on the bleeding gash in my head.  I must have had blood all down my face and on my shirt by this point as I tried to convince him I was OK and could just wash it off in the bathroom and continue on to the lesson.  The look on his face told me he wasn’t quite buying it and he made me get into his truck and drove me home.    

I don’t remember getting home or what I said to my parents, but I do remember they were less concerned about the cornet than the gash in my head which surprised me as a kid.  Of course it makes sense to me now that I am a parent and have a son near that same age.  It seemed to me at the time that the cornet was somehow more substantial than I was and would live on long after I was gone.  I thought even back then that it would be passed down to my son and to his son, ad infinitum, like a family heirloom.  But it was lost at some point after I left my parent’s house in my twenties, last seen under the front pew of a church that was soon to close its doors and swallow that cornet whole.

The Connecting Hand

The Ascension of Flippo, King of the Clowns

On some dark and stormy nights

when the thunder rolls and 

the house creaks in the wind

I swear I can hear the electric purr of the 

motorized chair lift on the stairs 

that used to be there, but is now only 

some empty screw holes and an outlet.

I can almost convince myself it is 

transporting Flippo, King of the Clowns, 

from a lower plane of existence to a higher one

step by step as he chuckles upwards

in the house where he lived for 40 years

that we have only borrowed for the past 10

but now are vacating as well.

***