Page 35, text and illustration
It was like my father to know exactly what I wanted without my ever having to hint. For my tenth Christmas he gave me a present of a shiny brass trumpet… However much my father respected the classics, he was unable to go along with Mrs. Blass’s vision of seeing me sawing away on a violin or singing in an opera. He modesly admitted to preferring the popular dance music of the day to the heavier stuff, and nearly every week he brought us the latest recordings of the Dixieland Jazz Band. The blues was just being born about this time and we wore the grooves off W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues before the record was three days old.
No directions went along with the gift of the trumpet because my father knew the problem of learning how to play the instrument would have to be my own worry. But there was no worry to it. Whenver Mrs. Blass went out of the house I turned on the records and sat next to the Victrola and blew myself red in the face. Eventually I got wind of how to play scales and a few other essentials, and after several months I played along with the best recorded orchestras in the nation.
Mrs. Blass probably felt about my playing the horn the way I felt about her weakness for the Ouija board. But blowing a horn seemed to me to be harmless, while having to play Ouija every night with her was not merely yboring, it got to be downright alarming…
