WAG - Lost Post
Note from 2005: In combing through the old posts, some interesting unfinished posts were found. This is one of them -
Note: I will be out this weekend (Friday night through most of Saturday) on a canoeing/camping trip with my Royal Ranger church group. I tentatively agreed to help out a month ago, but in the rush, had forgotten about the commitment until Sunday. During the two weeks when I was out of the loop, some commanders who had originally promised to go opted out and more boys showed an interest in going. Considering those shifting integers and fractions, my attendance became even more important. Since I have become one of the point people on this trip, concerning details, at the time of this posting, I should be floating downriver.
To follow through on my promise of uninterrupted (or at least less frequently), here is a flashback posting I’ve been mulling over.
The contents of the trumpet man’s pockets
A quick explanation of the title before moving into the main feature:
I believe I have mentioned the subject before, but I have long been intrigued by the premise of the short story Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets by
Jack Finney , the author who also wrote “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Love Letter.”
A gross oversimplification of his story, which I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU TO READ (when you have the time, of course), a man finds faces death and morosely wonders what people will think of him should he die and the only clue to his demise be a crumpled piece of yellow paper filled with unintelligible scribblings.
It is curious to ponder what conjectures or judgments people might make on your life based on what items you were carrying at the moment of your death.
This thought has floated through my head recently since I’ve taken to carting my trumpet around campus in a duffel bag. With the combination of student staff responsibilities, classes, and Marching Mizzou (which is technically also a class, but it is more like a club in setup and time commitments), I have switched to an easier mode of transporting my instrument. It’s lighter than a regular trumpet case, I can cram more stuff into it, and it attracts less attention when I slip in from one world to the next . Having a trumpet case sit next to you at the copy desk or Residential Life meetings is sure to draw more attention than other methods.
Since I have been hitting certain functions or obligations back to back to back, more items have ended up in my makeshift instrument case. Adding in the seasonal increase of traffic around Mizzou (coming on the heals of the summer where the university lived up to its claim of being a pedestrian campus), I’ve more than once had a near hit crossing the street and wondered what people may have made of the items I was carting around.
Here is an incomplete list of items that I’ve toted around in my bag. Also realize not all the items were ever ALL in the bag at the same time. Make whatever assumptions you will:
One brass trumpet,
One metal mouthpiece,
One music lyre held together with rubber bands,
One rubber band ball
One flip folder,
Two bottles valve oil
Field chart
water cup
Dixie
3 copies of schedule
3 Fliers: "Drinking and Driving," "How can I reduce my risk of being carjacked?" and "Crime Prevention for people with physical disabilities"
caribineer
trumpet trigger
hard candy
legal pad
checkbook
candy wrappers
granola bars
One copy of the Marching Mizzou student handbook and syllabus,
One copy of the Marching Mizzou 2004 Tentative Performance Schedule,
One copy of the Cramer/Defoe Staff Training Manual 2004,
One copy of the Cramer and Defoe halls on-call schedule – Fall 2004,
One bottle with a “Fruit Dazzle – Strawberry” label filled with tap water,
One Sony Discman CD player,
One set of heavily worn earphones,
One burned CD titled “Southern Sojourns: Beating it to Border,”
One squished banana,
One umbrella cover,
One busted umbrella,
One copy of Working with Words: A Handbook for Media Writers and Editors
One copy of the Columbia Missourian Handbook of Local Style
One copy desk log
One Journalism and Mass Communication learning community notebook
(list remains incomplete, though you get the idea...)
