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 caps and 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.” Terri thought about it and replied after a long hesitation. “OK, but we'd better be careful with it.”
We placed the trombone at the end of the course and tilted it slightly upwards so the ball would stay, but only if you hit it just right. We had what we needed. A difficult last hole!
Everything went well until I hit the ball a little too hard, and it got stuck in the trombone’s throat. We tried everything, but couldn’t get it out, and Frank would be home from school soon and would need to practice. We could have been in trouble, but I had a quick solution. I ran upstairs, grabbed a butter knife and carefully pried the golf ball loose from the shiny trombone. I put the trombone away and said, “We’d better not use it on the course anymore.” Terri replied in a firm voice. “Good idea!” And as she abruptly headed to the door with her head slightly bowed, mumbled, “I need to go home now. See you later.”
Frank continued to practice his notes, and I continued to play the trombone the way I liked. It sounded the same to me, but when Mom returned the leased trombone at the end of the semester, they wouldn’t give the deposit back. They told her that someone had scratched the throat of the trombone, which made it unusable because of the change in the sound. When I heard about it, I admitted using the butter knife to remove the golf ball and said I was sorry to Mom and Dad and Frank.
I think Mom and Dad weren’t too hard on me because it was an honest mistake. They knew I loved the trombone, miniature golf and creativity. It was just hard to predict that I would combine all three and then use a butter knife as a creative, yet admittedly unwise solution for removing a golf ball. Besides, they had a good idea that a fourth grader wouldn’t know that a minor scratch would affect the sound and cost them a lot of money.
