Suzanne Guess

In fourth grade, my music teacher recommended that I learn to play an instrument after I did well on the flutophone (a white plastic tube with red keys that looked like a recorder) music unit. I chose the flute after being entranced by it during an elementary school concert when I was in first grade. It had been a long three-year wait.

I went all in on music education: summer band camp, marching across football fields and down streets in parade formation, and earning college credits for playing in a wind ensemble. After college, I put my flute away and did not play it again for 20 years until a friend from elementary school encouraged me to join the community band where he played. “No, I said, “it’s been too long.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” he told me. “You don’t forget”

He was partially right, because I did forget that key signatures aren’t suggestions, the necessary air pressure to hit a third octave B-flat, and the trills that sound like what hummingbird wings look like when the birds go in for the sugar water.

I’ve been playing in a community band for several years now, and it’s a joy to share key signature fails, accidental solos, friendship, and bad jokes with those who come together for a single reason: to play music. It provides a small measure of healing to create something beautiful in a world where polarization is the norm, students are shot dead at school, and the earth warms as a consequence of our actions.

I think of the girl I first saw playing a flute in the elementary school band, and I hope that she is still playing her flute, too.