The Unexpected

If the ghost of Jacob Marley had appeared to me at this time yesterday evening and told me that within the next 24 hours I would be making 11 PM travel arrangements, coercing confidential information from a security company, and playing the drumset, I'd have been at least a bit skeptical.

As it happened, J and I were turning the lights out around 10:30 PM, and she had just reminded me that I needed to pick up some of James' bottles and utensils that were left at Hilltop when I visited the next day. I was perfectly comfortable under the covers and quilts, knowing that my alarm wasn't going to go off early tomorrow and that my Christmas break had begun..

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BUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ!

I started awake and looked at my phone without my glasses on. I couldn't see very clearly, but then I made out "Davis, Tim" as the caller ID. What did my brother-in-law want at 11:10 PM? Whatever it was, it could wait until tomorrow morning. I turned it off and rolled over, trying to fall back asleep.

BUZZ! BUZZ! BUZZ!

This wasn't my phone. It was J's, and it was Tim calling again. She picked up, and Tim very excitedly offered to drive up from PA first the next morning to fix our broken PT Cruiser. This information took awhile to penetrate my sleep-soaked brain...I still was trying to figure out what time it was. But when I came to and realized what was actually going on, and I was amazed at Tim's generosity. He'd already made arrangements to tow a dolly up with him and use a friend's garage and lift, doing all of the labor for free. We knew that there would be a storm coming in, so we left it until tomorrow to confirm.

The next morning was perfect until about 9:30 AM. James slept in, and then snuggled in bed with us for about 20-30 minutes with hardly any of his wonted 13-month-old wiggling fits. We had a leisurely breakfast, brewed coffee, and held him up to windows to watch the snow coming down and blanketing the fields around us. We lit a scented candle in the kitchen, put on Christmas music, and played with blocks. And we called our mechanic, telling him to please hold off on replacing the timing belt in our PT Cruiser, since J's brother was available to do that for us. We didn't hear back, so we called again and left another message. And we didn't hear back, so we called again. Nothing

It's a six hour trip from PA in good weather...we know we needed to make sure that the Gaxmobile was accessible if Tim was to make that substantial of a trip, so I drove over to the shop to confirm that the car was parked outside.

Alas, into the cold outside. The snow looked beautiful from inside our warm house with pajamas on, but stepping outside in it was unpleasant, and soon my shoes and socks were soaked from scraping off the car in our unplowed driveway. I slipped and skidded my way through the half-plowed roads into the village of Spencerport, and arrived at the mechanic's to find an empty lot. The cruiser was sitting in a bay with the hood propped open, locked away quite securely.

Now when I say "our mechanic," I really mean "the mechanic that AAA was willing to tow our car to." We have our own regular mechanic, and though we'd met the gentleman in Spencerport once before, we've had no regular contact with him. We don't know his name. We don't know his home phone number. We have no means of contacting him when he's not at the shop. I checked all around the dark office windows and even asked around at the fire station next door, but had no luck. (All they knew was that he didn't work on weekends.)

The only number I could find was the contact number for General Security, which had a decal on his front window. I called them, gave them my address, and explained the situation. I begged and pleaded for a home phone number.

"Sorry sir, but we aren't allowed to give out confidential information."
"What about a name? If you gave me his name I could try to find him in the white pages."
"No sir, we aren't allowed to do that."
I stretched the truth a little bit.
"This is the vehicle that we were going to use to get home for Christmas...is there any way that you could call him and let him know that we're trying to get in contact with him?"

As punishment for my slight prevarication about Christmas (we're perfectly capable of getting to Pennsylvania in the Neon) we never received any calls back, even though the kind but inflexible security rep did promise us to call his home number and pass along my message. We called Tim and let him know not to come. He may still travel up with us after Christmas to work on the Gaxmobile, which would save us lots and lots of money. I think that the last chapter in this story has not yet been written. It would all be very interesting if it was happening to someone else.

I arrived home cold and slightly put out to J, James, and lunch. Since J was doing the last of the Christmas shopping with her best friend in the afternoon, James came with me to the Flock of Uncles recording session scheduled at Hilltop. J helped us to bundle up and reminded me to pick up the missing bottles while I was there, and we drove off to meet Calvus, Pax, and Lux.

Some people might think it's an unwise idea to bring a small child to a recording session, but they've never met James. It turns out that he's a very sensitive child who only wants to watch and listen to his Father and his Uncles play jazzy Christmas tunes. We had considerably more problems from the Uncles than from the baby. (Also, many thanks to Kylie and Nicole for their babysitting help.)

When J is asked to describe the Uncles sound, she calls us "improvisatory." By that she means that we do almost everything in a chaotic and unorganized fashion flying by the seat of our pants and reading music (if anyone remembered to bring music) from a single stand (if anyone remembered to bring a stand) and relying mostly on telepathy to arrange the finer details of a tune, such as when everyone is going to stop and start and what key we'll be playing in. I've done a couple of recording sessions this year, but today's was the only one in which the members of the group were recording music they had never seen on instruments that they had never played before. It turns out that the mandolin isn't that difficult.

Also, I played the drums for the first time. I've been getting to paid to teach other people how to play the drums for the past two years, so it's actually a bit of a relief that I can kind of play them. I played the drumset (read: a high-hat and a snare drum with one wire brush) on an up-tempo rendition of Joy to the World. James thought it was great. He danced with his eyes shut and one hand up in the air, which he usually only saves for his favorite Celine Dion recording. (Potential album title for the next Flock of Uncles recording: Almost as Good as Celine.)

I heard a little bit of my drumming afterwards, and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. I wouldn't want to do it very often, though. As I held the drumsticks and pumped the high-hat pedal, I could feel my attention span decreasing. The music seemed to blur in and out of focus, and all the dynamic markings seemed to look like "forte or fortissimo" to me. Drumming good. Drumming very good. Hit things with sticks. Hit things with sticks louder! Hunt meat! Hunt meat for food!

Sorry...got a little carried away there with my drumset playing.

We finished the project (A Very Uncles Christmas) and Pax is mixing it down right now. We intend to give it to our older relatives, especially those who are unlikely to listen to it or have developed significant hearing loss. Our "improvisatory" style of performing doesn't always carry over very well to the recording studio. We finished the whole thing in less than five hours, and when I bundled up James to go home he hadn't interrupted a single track.

Of course, we forgot the bottles.