A Mistake You Only Make Once

I'm not feeling well today.  My husband got everyone ready and off to school and left me here in bed to take it easy so I'll be in better shape to go to work later.  The dog is curled up at my feet.  I can hear trains going by and the sun is shining outside my window.  It's hard to lie still when there is so much to do, but in a minute I'm going to try to sleep again.  Just so I don't feel completely unproductive here's a brief story from last week:

Last Tuesday we had a big slushy snowstorm.  It made driving dangerous and caused my daughter's choir rehearsal to be cancelled.  I drove Quinn to his piano lesson and the normally ten minute drive took us nearly an hour on the way home.  I had a rehearsal on the other end of town so as soon as I dropped Quinn off I grabbed my case from the front room and turned right back around to give myself time to navigate the snowy streets.

I got to rehearsal in plenty of time!  I even found a good parking space.  I used the extra time to catch up on my reading.  And at ten to seven I went back into the orchestra room to get out my viola and start warming up.

But there was nothing in my case.


Such a weird sensation to have disbelief and realization flood your mind in the same fraction of a second.  I'd left my instrument hung up on the wall at home in our practice room.  In my hurry I hadn't remembered to check, I'd just grabbed my case and gone, more worried about the weather than anything else.  Ha.

I stood there for a moment wondering what to do, and entertaining the ridiculous brief hope that maybe someone had brought a spare viola?  Which is insane.  The irony is that of all the people in the room, as the owner of a violin store the most likely person to even have spare violas around would be me.

Completely embarrassed I showed my empty case to the conductor and told him I was gong to go home and get my instrument.  He looked alarmed that I would have to do extra driving in a blizzard and was kind enough to tell me if it looked too bad out there to just stay home.

But we're doing Beethoven's 8th Symphony and that piece is busy busy busy.  I really needed the rehearsal time, because one of the tricky parts of playing viola is we nearly always follow and almost never lead, so figuring out where we fit in to the scheme of the music is often more complicated than learning to play it on our own.

So I drove home, brushed the kids off as they piled on me when I came in the door saying, "I love you too but no I'm not really home I just need my viola AAAGGGHHHH!" and somehow got back into my seat and was playing Beethoven just over half an hour later.

Tomorrow (and forever afterward) I will check my case before I leave the house.

(My whole head feels like I'm on the verge of a sneeze that won't come.  That's not exactly a ring of hell, but is there a ring of irritation?  Time to sleep, perchance to sneeze.)