Friday, July 24, 2020

Three Ideas from Mary on her leaving Annis Bay

Yesterday Mary and Rhiannon went back to Lethbridge.

“Come,” Mary says to Bonnie, “before leaving, I just have time to give you a 10 minute “
'Intro to Drumming Class' that I have been wanting to give you.”

... drums gently lifted from the ground
and the noise filling the room, as it should with drumming ...
Not that Mary hasn’t been around for some weeks.

It is just that when she is here she is always multi-tasking three items at a time: getting supper (a main meal and then different meals for those with allergies), playing a board game, and keeping a phone conversation alive; yes, all at the same time and with a smoothness that means no burned pots, she wins the board game, and she answers all of the question of the person on the phone line.

Really?

And now she says to Bonnie, “I am going to teach you two rhythms which will make you a basic level drummer,” laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

But they get the drums, take their positions and Mary begins.

“The first is called I like peanut butter, I like jam.” They switch the words around so that the meaning is I like Miranda’s kuchen, which everyone has just eaten that morning.

Miranda comes in the room and the two drummers
perform the rhythm that has her name in it.
She laughs.
Still they have change the words to fit the rhythm and they practise for a while.

“The second rhythm is called ‘walk the fat dog’”, but they change it to “chase the chickens”, which is a rhythm I have enacted.

Someone spotted me out on the porch with a broom chasing the chickens a few mornings ago. I thought I was alone.

I forgot that Mary is working from home, and on Ottawa time, so she is at her computer at 7 am, which I thought was a good time to chase the chickens.

A scene out of a movie where the camera is slowly panning a view taken from a car that slowly drives by an old farm house and, there is an old woman limping along with her broom, wildly swatting at chickens who are on her porch.

Well, that turns out to be the drum rhythm, “chase the chickens” and soon Bonnie and Mary are doing the rhythms in opposition to each other, both laughing and playing with the sound of two basic rhythms that will take a drummer anywhere.

Arta Then Mary and Rhiannon hop in their car and leave for Lethbridge.

2 comments:

  1. The rhythm in honour of Miranda was "I love Miranda, she's the best." What a fun 10 minutes.

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  2. We haven't practised again, but I was in Bonnie's room and I noticed myself rubbing the top of one of the drums, a loving caress in honour of that lesson in the bedroom -- a 10 minute lesson, a life-time of drumming fun.

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