Hanukkah Harry and the myths we tell ourselves
I tend to construct these truths in my mind – most of which are centered around adages that I have heard all my life – as in, if you do this and behave this way, you will be rewarded this way. But then life has a way of throwing curve balls left and right and you start realizing that there is no right way so to speak and there may not even be good intentions as every action is created from somebody who has biased intentions. So we light the menorahs every night of Hanukkah and last night we didn’t have enough candles to light all of them and for some reason it felt weird.
Who says you have to light all of them? There used to be just one menorah and now there are eleven menorahs.
So it got me thinking about Tin and about what we need to do as parents to ensure that if he is musically gifted we are doing every thing in our power to guide him. Two musicians have told me in the last two days the same story – “when I was young, so and so, a respected musician and mentor told me that I should go into music ONLY if there was no other choice” – so you figure, whatever I do to not help Tin, he will, if he is a musician, find a way to make music. Right?
We were in my neighbor’s backyard listening to Evan Christopher, John Rankin and James Singleton and I was thinking about them as they played up on the deck while we sat down in the yard – well I was thinking many things. One thing I was thinking is that how wonderfully lucky we are to be neighbors with all three of these musicians. Another thought was that a musician’s life is pretty tough as I had just been speaking to one of them and he said musicians in New Orleans are blessed and cursed – they make less money than other cities but they have a better lifestyle than other cities. I was also thinking I wonder if Tin will grow up to be a musician as I was watching him watching them. Then I thought hell, what does it matter what he becomes, he will grow up to love music because of the exposure he gets from us, from New Orleans, from our friends and so as he played his toy trumpet and grooved with the big boys, I went back to my original thought, I’m lucky. Damn lucky.