The Beat of Love

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I found the scuffed snare drum in a music store with a faded price tag of seventy-nine dollars. The price included a case and drumsticks, but I was 25 years old and money was hard to come by.

Failure had already begun tapping at my door by the time I saw that drum. I dropped out of my first college, got kicked out of a second, and enrolled at a third known for its “progressive” approach, which meant they were used to students like me.

Romantic relationships were even worse. The goal was true love, but my dating record read like a pulp novel where the main character is only attracted to people who are in love with someone or something else. My young heart was held together by a roll of spiritual duct tape.

I still had one dream though. I wanted to play the drums. So I paid the money at the music store and proceeded to cart that drum through three states, six towns, ten apartments, and four relationships.

In a stroke of divine intervention, the fourth relationship was a keeper. We bought a house, had a ceremony, and made numerous unsuccessful attempts to have children, which resulted in buying a dog. We had some heated financial disagreements, suffered through poorly-thought-out career choices by yours truly, and came to terms with approaching mid-life by falling in and out of depression.

I had owned that snare drum for seventeen years by then. For the first few years, the sight of it elicited a sense of excitement, symbolizing a promise to myself that music was a dream I would pursue.

By year 17, the drum was relegated to the back of a closet. I couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore—a reminder of another dream that was never going to materialize.

Month by month the drum got closer to the thrift store. The thought of a musical instrument sitting in the closet collecting dust when someone else might play it nagged at my conscience. Besides, I’d entered my 40s and everyone knows that’s the beginning of the end.

While I had mentioned my musical aspirations to my spouse early on, and she had asked once or twice how long that drum was going to reside with us, I hadn’t talked about my dream in years.

For reasons that are a mystery, she suddenly decided to surprise me with a beginner’s drum kit for Christmas—in bright pink, my favorite color. The kit came in a huge box that she somehow managed to push up our stairs and cover in gift wrap. There it was, a day before the holiday, sitting under the tree.