Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a song that haunts me.  I can sometimes hear it in my dreams, nay, my nightmares. I’ve sung it over and over again. Not through joy, not for practice, but through compulsion. I’ve been forced to sing it.

By children. By babies. My children, my babies.

Imagine yourself in a motor vehicle. You can think of a Ford pickup truck if you want to if you don’t have another motor vehicle in mind.  Now imagine it going down the interstate highway that incircles Dallas, Texas in bumper-to-bumper traffic going at the speed of 75 miles per hour.  Your wife is riding shotgun and your baby is in a child safety seat between the two of you.  

It’s a bench seat for those of you who are confused and was by no means designed for the baby seat.  But don’t worry; the child safety seat was not designed to be deployed like that either.

Let’s add a soundtrack to the scene.  The child, who is just over a year old, is crying. You don’t blame the child for this because–if you were alone–you would be crying too because of the traffic.  The child’s face is orange with Cheeto-dust, because she doesn’t cry when she has a Cheeto in her mouth.  Cheetos, however, have their limits, so at some point another distraction is needed.  You need a song, a song that both you and your wife know.

The repertoire of songs shared by you and your wife is small, so you begin:

This Old Man, he played one… 

This was a good song for the purpose. The verses are simple and, with a little imagination, you can make up new ones”: “This Old Man/ He played 30/ He played knick knack down and dirty…”

We survived.  We are stronger.  The vividness of the memory remains.

The memory comes back to me now because I am learning to play it on the recorder. Our Lord said, that if you are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you must become like a little child.

I am taking the philosophical point of view that that is the best way to learn how to play the recorder as well. I’ve bought the beginner books. The ones I have seem to assume the reader is about eight years old. The list of songs in one of them includes “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” “My Darling Clementine,” and, my old favorite, “This Old Man.”

I’ve decided to embrace “This Old Man” as my theme music for the current period of my life.  As the tune progresses, I will add my own verses,

This Old Man, he played 63, //

He played knick knack when he had to get up to take a pee…

It doesn’t quite scan, but we could call it the jazz version.

One of my grandsons is learning to play the piano now.  He comes to our house to practice because we inherited a piano from my wife’s mother.

Watching him is quite instructive.  While he does want to learn how to play the piano–he’s been given the opportunity to stop and has refused–sometimes getting him to stay on task is like pulling teeth.  During his practice, his grandmother listens to him play.  His attention will wander after a few minutes.  After he’s piddled a while, his grandmother will direct him back to the task at hand.

By way of contrast, when I practice, I keep my nose dutifully to the grindstone.  I repeat songs over and over again.

In spite of this, my grandson is better than I am.  You can tell what he is playing.  In my case, when I try my hand at “Scarborough Fair” and my wife thinks it’s the theme song to MASH.

Yet I am hooked.  While I am still doing woodwork, practicing the recorder is something I can do after I shower-up from the woodshop for the day.  It’s relaxing. It gives me something to limber up my hands with.

And I can play a tune and conjure up the memory of a little face covered with Cheeto dust who was–for some unknown reason–comforted by the sound of “This Old Man.”

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He has several other stories about his travels in Paraguay posted there.