Nirvana

I'm home with Samson today, and we had a very exciting morning. With his birthday coming up, I've been trying to find some cool (and not too expensive) instruments for him to play. Specifically, I've been looking for those little hand percussion instruments that drummers usually carry around in a bag with them (cow bell, claves, that crickety-sounding thing). So yesterday, I did a search online for music stores near us. Wouldn't you know it, there's a huge one just a few miles away.

It has been pouring all morning, but I think both Samson and I were ready for a little time outside, so we headed out around 10 to find this place. I didn't tell him where we were going, given how our last guitar store field trip went, but when we pulled up I knew we were safe.

The place is the size and shape of a Toys R Us, but with huge pictures of the Jimmys (Page and Hendrix) in their display windows. Inside was a wall of electric guitars that stretched about 14 feet high and easily 50 yards long. Samson looked up, blinked, and then smiled.

Seriously, it was like that scene in Wayne's World, complete with a guy trying out a guitar/playing a Zeppelin song. It was not, mercifully, "Stairway to Heaven," but was (I think) "The Rain Song." The staff all looked like superannuated (or never annuated) rock stars --- tattooed, pierced, black-leather-clad, and otherwise rock star-y. Very metal indeed.

I asked the guy at the security gate [Sidenote: is there a real threat of someone smuggling out a bass guitar in his pants?] if they had drums, and he pointed me to the back.

In the percussion room, we got to see all sorts of stuff [and I got to fast-forward a few years and calculate just how expensive this fascination with drums is going to be]. We played some maracas and a cabasa, but Samson was way more interested in the various drum kits that were set up on the sales floor. Even so, I picked up a pair of claves that I thought would be fun.

When I mentioned to the guy behind the counter that I was looking for a small pair of drumsticks so Samson would stop using rulers, chopsticks, pencils, crayons, etc, he had just the thing. And then he offered to let Samson try them out.

I wish I had a camera with me. The sight of Samson sitting on the stool behind a huge drum kit and banging away at the different drums and cymbals must have been something else.

I say must have been because I was behind him making sure he didn't fall off the stool as he reached his little arms across the kit to hit the crash cymbal. [Sidenote: one cool thing about drum stores is that they really don't mind if you make a lot of noise. And we made a lot of noise.]

When he was done, he turned around --- sticks still in hand --- and smiled the way the Buddha must have that morning under the Bodhi tree when he finally figured it all out.