What specifically you ask is a puzzle after all isn’t retirement per se far more complicated than you ever anticipated? Getting old you always knew might be tricky but there’s tricky and there’s darn right perverse.
Specifically the role of music in my life has been complicated all along and it’s only getting more so. Let me explain. I may have told you before that I (and probably a million more teenagers) was in a group, you know like the Beatles but without any of the talent. Forgive me if I’ve told you before but I for a brief spell played the piano or didn’t if there was no piano at the gig, which was mostly.
But the complication was that I developed a condition that I think today is called ‘earworms’, musical ones that is. To put it another way I got the tunes we were rehearsing stuck in my head. And it drove me crazy. I even ended up being referred by my enthusiastic GP, to a child psychiatrist. He asked me if I heard voices – no just tunes and did that painting which was hung askew bother me – no but I didn’t like the picture. Anyway, he didn’t cure me other than offering me tranquilisers. So that relationship did not last.
And neither did my musical career. I tinkered with my guitar playing tunes I liked, but stopped with them when they became intrusive, i.e. got stuck in my head. If that happened I never found a way of getting rid of them other than to replace them with another tune not quite so irritating. Anyway the short version is that music with others never played the part in my life I would have liked. Until I retired and took up playing jazz, and back to the piano, now called a keyboard.
The jazz worked well because you could improvise and so, if you were clever (which I am not) never play the same tune twice. This suited me well and, for a while, all was, if not well, then perhaps adequate. This small amount of success playing jazz in a ‘group’ led to me push the metaphorical boat out, playing guitar in folk fiddle sessions.
Both these retirement activities ground to a halt when I got ill and frankly could not bring myself to do much of anything and certainly not music which, even at its best, was a challenge. For a year or so I played no music at all.
But, and the reason I’m writing this now, is that two weeks ago I attended my first folk fiddle session for over a year. This in the context of the pushing myself as opposed to rolling over and quietly dying. I’ve done two now and I have to say all has not been plain sailing. As I say it’s been complicated.
Nobody welcomed me back with ‘a thank God you’re back we’ve missed you’. But then I’m not sure they know that I’d been ill, very ill. I wanted to tell them but that seemed too needy even by my standards of neediness. My son-in-law suggested I should wear a T shirt with the words – be nice to me, I’ve been very ill (been just ill was not enough, it had to have the ‘very’).
And the main guitarist who I will call Frank probably wouldn’t have taken any notice. I have the greatest of respect for him but for him to tell me during our first session that I was ‘driving too hard’ seemed unnecessarily critical. I never have handled musical criticism well and that, it seems, hasn’t changed / got worse.
And as for playing the ‘been very ill’ card this would have been trumped by Iveta’s (the group leader) partner coming even closer than I had to dying and so everybody was asking about him. And it was Iveta’s first session back after several weeks away.
So just pushing myself to come back to the sessions (a whole new set of tunes to learn) would have been hard enough but with all these complications and some remaining health problems to deal with, there was very little wiggle room for yours truly to make a grand entrance. I’ve been very ill you, know, be nice.
Yes, I have been away. Oh never mind, I’ll see you next week. Or will I? Watch this space.