My Clarinet, Myself

I recently exhumed my hated clarinet, and like most recovered corpses, its unholy odor rose to the high heavens and knocked the very birds from the sky. Did I rush to assemble the confounded machinery and tootle five bars of “I Lift Up My Finger And I Say Tweet Tweet?” No, and I didn’t dance around the open case with jazz hands, either. Instead, I silently relived the horror of middle school band: the lessons in the airless vault with the deeply pocked and oily bachelor instructor; the sideways, derisive glances from wee colleagues who had new, sweet-smelling clarinets; and later, the lies! O, the lies! “Just play clarinet for one more semester, and then we’ll move you to oboe.” Well, Mrs. Gulden, you wild-eyed deceiver, that certainly didn’t happen, did it?