Real shortstops don’t bite their gloves.
Growing up with an older brother (Garland) and two orderly cousins (Earle and Harvey) who lived across the yard meant that I was often cast in the most inconsequential roles in games and sports. For example, all the neighboring children played baseball in a clearing in our garden; in reality, the clearing was the infield, and any ball that came out of the infield went into the orchard. It was parked to the right of second base where a pear tree grew about 10 feet behind the bag. I positioned myself safely behind the trunk, set my teeth firmly on the thumb of my baseball mitt, and prayed, “Dear God, don’t let the ball come to me.” I kid you not, I still have that glove, complete with the teeth marks of a seven-year-old.
If I ever ventured out from the safety of that place in the crotch of that comforting old pear tree, I have no recollection of it. I think I played several seasons in that position, which might partly explain why later, when I came out to play baseball in high school, I was less than awesome. I tried to play shortstop like a normal person, but when you’re used to a pear tree protecting you from hard ground balls and line drives, it’s hard to get used to standing out in the open. I tried hard; Also, not to bite my glove, but I found the taste of leather so relaxing that it was a temptation that I found difficult to resist.
My baseball career came to a screeching halt when I was playing for the eighth grade team at EV Cain Elementary School. It was a pop fly to the infield, and the second baseman and I called for the ball, then collided, allowing the ball to fall untouched by human hands, which in turn allowed me to score the winning run. The incident itself was fairly common, but what really annoyed my coach was that he apparently had the thumb of my glove in his mouth while looking at the ball.
“Shinn, I can’t believe you had the glove in your mouth! If you need to suck your thumb, find another place to do it. A baseball field is not the place.”
I guess that’s why I took up the trombone. No one yells at you when you have a mouthpiece in or around your mouth, and I didn’t have to worry about line hits or collisions with other band members. Also, my older brother Garland played the trombone and helped me get started. Tommy Dorsey was big in those days, and he played a piece called “Tromboneology” that Garland was learning, and he also intrigued me, with his smart, jazzy moves. I envisioned myself at the bandstand, adoring fans looking at me with eyes full of adulation, playing the best swing songs of the day. I deftly improvised through Cherokee’s multi-faceted chord changes, then gently broke into the smoothest version of Stardust you can imagine. The crowd went wild. I was barely able to finish my solo before thunderous applause drowned out the band.
My fantasy dream was rudely interrupted by the annoying voice of Mr. Newcomb, my eighth grade band director.
“Shinn, what the hell are you doing? The rest of us are playing “Stars And Stripes Forever.”
The rest of my trombone career was somewhat better. In high school, I worked my way up to 3rd chair, sitting behind Sybil McKenna, the big fat first chair, and Ola Lee Murchison, the skinny 6’6″ multi-talented athlete and 2nd chair. (who happened to play football for that new expansion team, the Dallas Cowboys), and ahead of a friend named Gary, who wasn’t much into music, but later saved me from suspending chemistry by gorging myself on formula late night before the final. In that order, you can always tell who the best trombonists were, as the eyeballs of the rest of us would tilt towards them seeing what position their slides were in. Trombonists can’t turn their heads without moving their slides, so the eyeballs had to turn dramatically to the left or right, depending on where the top trombonists were sitting.But since we sat in the order of our ability, all the eyeballs of the entire section were leaning to the left, toward the first and second chairs. I was closest to the only two trombonists who could read music, so I’d watch Ola’s slide, Gary would watch mine, and so on. Our director once suggested that we would save ourselves eye strain by learning to read the notes ourselves, an idea that had not occurred to us until then. I worked on that a bit, but found Ola’s hand to be a more direct route to the correct note. However, between reading Ola’s notes and reading slides, I did pretty well in high school band. Pretty cool, in fact, that in my senior year I was selected as the third most likely to succeed band member. A friend named Mike, a wonderful tenor saxophonist, was chosen as the most likely to succeed, followed by Ola. And while we certainly appreciated the picks at the time, they turned out to be pretty inaccurate. Neither Mike nor Ola nor I played our instruments very much, but a kid who was not noticed and played the oboe, the only oboe in our band, now plays with the Portland Symphony. It’s funny how things change over time.
In our band building there were a series of small practice rooms, with small windows in each door so you could see if the room was occupied. All kinds of wild and wonderful things were going on in those little rooms, including the conjugation of Latin verbs to the rhythm of the first three notes of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C minor. “Vini, vidi, vinos” we sang in unison, and then we laughed so hard we thought we’d throw up. However, Mr. Walker, the bachelor choir leader, never thought it was funny, and we often found ourselves kicked out of practice rooms. However, it was a wonderful help in learning Latin, and the “B” I got from Miss Estes was largely due to those musical conjugations.