A trumpeter plays preps for his performance. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
I worked with two men in construction for a while. As it usually goes with these types of rough men, their transformation into builders has a reason. I generally try to find that.
Little clues into their lives are splattered here and there. It just takes the right key, and the lock springs open. This time it was references to music.
It was during lunch, and I asked one of them, the elder and job foreman, if he ever played an instrument.
He told me when he was a child he fell in love with playing the trumpet. He had a goofy overbite and buckteeth, so he was teased by the other children. He hated the way he looked.
So he stayed inside and practiced day in and day out on the trumpet. He got very good at it. All through high school he played. Apparently there were blues bands that wanted to recruit him, along with possibilities of going to college for music. He opened for big acts, played in the school band and went to state a few times.
Boy, he could play that thing.
Then one day he got a second opportunity. A surgeon offered to fix his teeth. It would be a somewhat arduous journey, requiring multiple surgeries and physical therapy.
It was his chance to look “normal,” so he seized it. Weeks went by, maybe a month or two, before it was over. But it finally was. He was ecstatic, so much so that his trumpet was forgotten for a time. Folks complimented him on his new good looks. Girls took notice, and he wasn’t such a lonely boy anymore.
He said one day he picked up the dusty trumpet and tried to play. But he couldn’t. Not like before. He couldn’t purse his lips right. His teeth felt foreign. Try as he might, he never could play the same way he had his whole life.
You see, his “deformity” had come with a gift, and once he changed it to become skin-deep, he lost it. Now he works construction, but sometimes at home, away from the crowds, he plays it for his wife. And I could see the forlorn notes in his eyes while he told me.
Our co-worker turned toward him. “You never told me that,” he said.
“You never asked,” the foreman replied.
Josh Miller is a union carpenter by trade and a writer by hobby. He lives with his partner in Anchorage.
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