The Song that Never Ends
Newsletter 2025-12-17
My life is turning into a musical. Just not the kind where everyone plays the same song at the same time. The lyrics, the rhythm, and the instruments might not go together, but it’s still technically all part of a single performance. The tie that binds it all together is chaos. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
All four of my girls are enthusiastic about completely different instruments. Betsy prefers the human voice. She breaks into song at random times while walking around the house like she’s a princess in a Disney movie. She takes after her mother, who went to college on a partial choir scholarship. If I had tried to sing in college, the college would have paid me to stop. Or maybe they would have paid the football team to beat me until I shut up. I’d say they’d go with whichever option was cheaper, but that institution wasn’t particularly good with its money. No wonder they keep asking me for donations even after they closed.
Betsy is a member of her high school’s elite show choir. It’s the only extracurricular musical group that didn’t squeeze in an official performance before the holidays. Everyone else saw a completely packed calendar and thought, “Why not us, too?” The truest Christmas carol is the desperate wail of a nervous breakdown. To be fair, the show choir did try to get in on the action. They weren’t ready for a full show, but they planned an all-day dance workshop to prepare for the upcoming competition season. They were stopped by winter itself. One of our unseasonably early storms brought the state to a halt and forced the group to cancel without rescheduling. It takes extreme weather for that to happen. For reference, IHOPs close before show choir cancels anything. For now, Betsy must stick to singing in her choir class during school hours and holding solo performances at home as she putters about from room to room. Those are the child noises I prefer to hear. It’s far better than the more common din of battle that emerges any time two or more of my children are in the same room.
Mae is the next most experienced kid on our musical hierarchy. She doesn’t sing, but she loves to play her saxophone. It’s the one I bought three years ago for $70 on Facebook Marketplace. To date, it’s still the best purchase I’ve ever made. I was going to make a joke about how the only better use of money was for an engagement ring since Lola comes with her own income, but, in hindsight, I probably could have purchased something cheaper and still gotten her to marry me. It’s for the best that I didn’t try. That’s one situation where it was too risky to optimize doing bare minimum.
Mae likes her saxophone enough that she practices at home for fun. She sets up in front of the big built-in mirror downstairs and has her own jam sessions. Her playing has improved over the years, to the delight (and relief) of all. When it comes to making noise, she has a mechanical advantage. Betsy only has her own vocal cords, which transmit in a gentle soprano range. Mae has a brass cannon that can shake the walls. Usually, it doesn’t come to that. Her loudest moments are when she uses her voice to attack one of her siblings. Her saxophone playing might be harmless, but her shouts could make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.
Lucy is the latest addition to the band family. As a newly minted sixth grader, this was the first year she was eligible to play an instrument in school. She chose the oboe, which I didn’t know existed until I had to buy one. That’s when I discovered that, despite its small size, it was the most expensive option she could have chosen. In a fairer world, instruments would be priced by the pound. I wasn’t able to match my amazing discount saxophone purchase. The best I could do was a used oboe for $300, which then cost another $300 to repair. I still came out better off than if I had bought a brand new one, some of which cost more than used cars I considered buying for Betsy. Lola never would have let me actually purchase a vehicle in that price range. Unlike cars, old instruments don’t kill anyone if they catastrophically fail. They just damage a few ear drums.
Like Mae, Lucy enjoys practicing at home in front of the big mirror. Sometimes, the two of them do it at the same time. At that point, it becomes a concert, or at least it would if they played together. Depending on their moods, they may or may not attempt to collaborate. Other times, they play completely different things and have fun blasting away. Lola isn’t a huge fan of the cacophony. As for me, I’ve heard worse. I’d rather they be playing than fighting, no matter how far apart the notes might be. It’s a state of happy disharmony.
It’s good that I don’t mind the racket because, recently, a fourth musician entered the fray. Waffle is learning to play the recorder at school. It’s the same plastic tube we bought years ago for one of the other girls. I suspect we paid less than twenty dollars. Given the material, it will likely outlast the much more expensive brass and woodwind instruments in this house. It will also outlast the house itself. Someday, this property will be a forest (or, more likely, a desert), and the only sign that humans ever lived here will be the half-buried recorder we will have left behind. Hopefully whoever is left—probably highly evolved cockroach archaeologists—will be able to find it. We struggle with that ourselves.
Last week, Waffle forgot to take her recorder to school. I happened to be working from home that day due to the weather. It was too dangerous for me to drive a minivan to the office, but not too dangerous for the kids to take a bus to school. I lack the bus driver’s heroic grit. Had Waffle left her instrument behind on any other day, she would have been out of luck. I interrupted important professional pursuits to bring my child a loud plastic toy. I’d hate for her educational experience to be diminished by her being unable to squeak with her peers. She also likes to squeak with her sisters. A few days ago, for the first time ever, Lucy, Mae, and Waffle all played together. They set up their performance in the playroom with the door closed. It didn’t make a difference. You could have heard that sound on the moon. While Mae and Lucy have some musical overlap in their knowledge, they had almost none with Waffle, beyond perhaps “Hot Cross Buns.” Maybe that’s what they were attempting to play up there. There’s no way to know for sure based on the sound. There’s a good chance they were playing every song at once. It even disturbed them a little, but not because of the audio. It was a moment of far too much cooperation for their taste. They did not attempt the feat again.
The girls have so much fun playing at home that I forgot all of this was leading somewhere beyond causing a ruckus. Tuesday night, Mae and Lucy had band concerts. Yes, concerts, plural. They were separate performances in the same place on the same night. If you want to get technical, there were at least five concerts in a row starting with sixth grade and ending with high school. The high school concert may have been broken into even more performances, but I had vacated the premises by that point. That was actually the polite thing to do. There wasn’t enough room in the auditorium for all those parents. I had to stay through the first four because of the spacing of my kids. Mistakes were made. The ethical move was to rope even more people into this extended musical experience. Lola was one step ahead of me there.
The confusing text messages started Monday night.
