Twenty years?

Josie has been asking (ok, begging) for me to get my old clarinet out and teach her how to play. Around this time next year she'll need to pick an instrument for 6th grade so I finally gave in a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty proud that I remembered how to put the thing together and also shocked at some of the things I found inside my clarinet case. Old band aids, a picture of my shoes (yes, shoes), a crumpled up football roster, and enough rubber bands to re-stock an office supply shelf.

Band aids? Apparently I had a cut? And apparently there were no garbage cans anywhere in sight.

Picture of shoes? No idea. None. Strange.

Football roster? Makes sense because we played at the football games.

Rubber bands? Sure, we used them to keep our sheet music in place while marching, but the sheer volume of rubber bands seemed excessive.

So I got the silly thing put together and thankfully had some brand new reeds (could you imagine trying to use a reed from 1997?? Ewww!) and was pretty quickly able to play a couple of scales. Success!

Then Josie asked me to play a song I knew from when I was in school. Pretty quickly our school fight song or the national anthem came to mind but do you think I could play either one to save my soul? Not a chance!

I was complaining about my lack of memory to a friend and she so lovingly pointed out that its been, what, 20 years since I was in band? In my mind there is no way that I've been out of high school that long. After all, I'm the baby of our group of friends.

Guess what showed up the next day? My invitation to our 20 year class reunion.

Ugh.