Michael: Rat a Tat Tat

The heat of the sun
Will quickly sweep away
Last night’s cold nightmares.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Up until last week I thought the drums of Volcan were dead. But they’ve been resurrected.

For some reason, the school’s here are very much into marching bands. We came here last January but didn’t discover how enamored school children are to drums until the beginning of March because that’s when the school year begins and the students go back to doing school stuff like practicing their instruments.

Some neighbor kid would practice the drums from around 7-8 every night often joined by some kids on horns. At the end of December, when school gets out and into November when their’s a few National holidays, there are a few large parades where the kids get to show off all of their hard work by marching down the main drag.

But since that time up until last week we hadn’t heard the dude practice. I figured he either graduated or was confident enough that he knew the routine where not much practice was necessary. But I was mistaken because he’s at it again. This time, I guess because he’s a little older, he’s pushed back his practice time to between 8-9. That’s just about our bed time, so hopefully he’s hit the ceiling of his practice time or next year, if he goes any later, we’ll have to put off our dreaming a bit unless we decide we enjoy marching band themed visions passing through our nightly delights.

I also just don’t understand the need to practice for more than 5 minutes. I mean for Christ’s sake, it’s a drum, not even a drum set, but a single marching band drum. Perhaps I’m a bit tone deaf to the subtleties of the sounds someone can get out of it, but it all pretty much sounds like Philip K. Souza stuff. They don’t ever break it up by stopping and whipping out the soft whisk brushes and break into any ballads or blues. No, it’s bang away with those hard cotton ball hammers from beginning to end.

Come to think of it, that would be a great way to break up the routine of the year end marches. Have the bands stand still and play their repetitive gig while the crowds walk past, that way the bands don’t have to pretend they’re doing anything new or complicated and the crowd doesn’t have to linger just to see and take pictures of their talented angel.