Empress of Toots

A Day in the Life of a Music Parent (Day 99)

Shriek Master Flash at work!

Little Bean is excited. She’s starting to accumulate what I would call a little kid music studio. She has an electric piano, given to her by a cousin, which she uses for her piano lessons. Her aunt gifted her a steel drum, which she already used to play “You Are My Sunshine.”

And now this. She reaches into her backpack and triumphantly withdraws her school recorder. These vanilla, plastic instruments rest someplace in the musical ether between a flute and a kazoo. Her school music teacher, who is also her piano teacher, has given the class their recorder rentals with the instructions of 15 minutes of practice each day.

“Ok,” I say, “show me what it can do.”

She puts the instruments to her lips and, well…

“Oh boy, what’s that?” my wife scalls over.

“It’s her recorder,” I say.

“It sounds like that?” she says.

“Well, she has to get good at it.”

“No,” Little Bean says, “that’s just what it sounds like!”

Oh boy.

This goes on for a few minutes; bleating and blooping and honking.

“Wait a minute,” Little Bean says suddenly, “I just remembered something!”

She runs downstairs and I hear her rummaging around in one of her toy bins. When she comes back up she’s holding a SECOND recorder, this one mat black.

“I thought I had one of my own!”

She puts the second record to her mouth and plays both a once, like some kind of Seussian Pied Piper. My own private Shrieky Gillespie. The dog comes running over yipping. The fish hides under his little water bridge. The cat and my wife run downstairs.

But I’m half deaf anyway so I just take a seat and listen to my little musical genius, in her own private Abby Road, squawking at the top her her lungs, a symphony of screeches.

My Empress of Toots.

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Housekeeping: Friends, tomorrow will be Day 100 of this daily marathon that began back on Nov. 1 2023. We’ve managed to write SOMETHING everyday for 100 days. Pretty neat! Thanks for humoring us. We’ll continue on, though I suspect this pace might fall apart around late March or April when the deadlines to complete NY State Fire Tower hiking guide becomes intense. We’ll see.

Until then, don’t forget to check out yesterday’s Cover Reveal post and maybe you can win a copy of the new rocks field guide book when it comes out! The link to that is here: Cover Reveal Party

You can also win a bunch of stuff like signed copies and art from Little Bean but bringing some referrals to Day By Day. We appreciate your help and support.

So, that’s it for now. Stay kind, oars into the water and we’ll see you tomorrow!