"Marywood"

When I first came to Marywood, the music camp I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. Then I saw where I’d be staying: in the four-car garage of an old mansion, built in the early nineteen hundreds. It was every sixth grade boy’s dream! The garage door wasn’t used anymore and the inside now was set up with bunk beds, but still, it was really cool! The counselor, John, was my french horn teacher for the next two weeks. His quarters were in the hallway between us and the bathroom and were as generously spacious as what a Navy crewman might hope for at sea. One of the nights, John told us about how he got mugged downtown and then chased down the mugger, pleading for his horn back. He explained how that was the way he made a living and talked about going from paycheck to paycheck until the guy finally agreed to give the horn back in exchange for a watch and a $30 cash card!

Now it was the Sunday afternoon of the final performance and all 40 of us were very excited and kind of nervous. Mom and Dad had come and taken me out for lunch. I just needed to warm up before the concert. Walking back into the garage, I didn’t notice anything out of place. I grabbed my horn from my bunk bed and tried to toot a few notes, but it wasn’t playing well, at all. “John?” I called, heading into the hallway, “am I doing something wrong? I can’t play my part.”

“Let me take a look, try playing again.” I blew into the mouthpiece but the rich ringing tone that should have followed was alarmingly absent. “Whoa,” he said, looking closer. “Let me see that a second.” I held the horn out to him. “What did you do to your bell?”

“My bell? Nothing, it was just laying on my bed, why?” I bent to look over his shoulder and realized that where before the bell had just had a bunch of dents in it, now the metal was quite crunched in.

“These braces are broken, too,” he said, twisting the horn back and forth a little to show me how the horn was moving when it should have been perfectly solid and still. “We’ve got to try to do something to fix this before the concert! Help me look for some tape or something.”

We started searching through our own stuff and the camp miscellaneous drawer. “Here’s some scotch tape,” I called.

“Looks like that’s going to be about the best we can do for now,” he said coming back around the corner. “Let’s see how it will work.” After trying to tape it back together, he handed it to me. “Try playing something.” I started playing my second horn part for one of the pieces that would be on the concert. It didn’t sound good, but it was a lot better than before the tape.

What neither of us counted on however, was how scotch tape would react with water. Not to long into the concert, the tape was rendered fairly useless by the moisture from my breath and the sound reverted back to the gurgling air noise.

After the concert, the camp director apologized profusely to my parents, explaining how the kids in the juvenile delinquent home across the street made a practice of sneaking over to Marywood once a summer and doing some act of vandalism. “Unfortunately,” she said, “it would appear that Chris’s horn was this year’s victim.”
    My parents sent it out right away to be repaired. When we went to pick it up, the repairman turned to me and asked, “So, have you been missing a pencil?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I answered. 

With a laugh he pulled a curved pencil out from his desk, handing it to me. “I found this jammed three-quarters of a turn from the bell! I have no idea how it got up that far but your horn should play a lot better now!”

The next day I headed in for my regular horn lesson. The perfectly smooth bell felt foreign to me in memory of it’s previously dented existence. 

“Alright,” my teacher said. “Play me the scale you’ve been working on.” I tried, but wasn’t able to play in tune at all. “What happened to your playing?!” While I explained the events of the past two weeks as best I could, he leaned back in his chair, scowling. There was a long pause and he finally said, “Your parents have got to get you a new horn!”