Trombones, Butter Knives, and Mini Golf

I was in fourth grade, and my brother Frank had just started junior high school. The school had an orchestra, so Mom and Dad gave him the opportunity to play a musical instrument. He chose the trombone.

I loved that trombone! I would go to the basement and play it, just like the trombone players in the parade. No need to play notes like Frank did when he practiced. That didn’t sound very good. It sounded so much better just blowing into it and working the slide back and forth. I marched around the basement with my chest puffed out and shoulders back, alternating playing and singing. “Seventy-six trombones in the big parade…”

Besides the trombone, I also loved miniature golf. My friend Terri and I would walk up to the local course and play. The course had a rule that if you got a hole in one on the last hole, you would get a free round. Of course, it was very difficult. Neither of us had much money, and the course was closed when the weather was bad, so when I suggested we set up a course in my basement, she agreed to help.

Terri brought over the clubs and balls that her mom and dad no longer used, and I supplied some large carpet scraps to lie on the concrete floor. The course turned out amazing! We made a water hazard out of a ramp and a dog’s watering bowl and a sand trap from the slide-out bottom of a hamster cage. Other hazards you had to navigate around included my mom and dad’s old bowling balls with smiley faces drawn on them, a variety of stuffed animals, and even a parakeet cage with a live parakeet inside.

After setting everything up, Terri looked at me with a puzzled look on her face and said, “We have a problem. What can we use to create the last hole?” I frantically looked around the basement and spotted what we needed. I was excited. “How about Frank’s trombone!” I put a golf ball inside and pulled it back out. “See, a perfect fit. It even has a built-in ramp. We can put it away when we’re done so Frank won’t even know we used it...” (The full story will be available in my upcoming anthology)