Why yes, I play the oboe. No, I haven’t met your cousin who played it until he was in the tenth grade, but I’m sure he was very good. No, I don’t sound like a dying duck, except when I’ve had a bit too much to drink.

Why did I take up the oboe? Let me tell you: It was going to be my ticket into university. The teachers at school needed someone to play the oboe solo, and I was one of those little brats who went through instruments like jelly beans, and I was bored of the clarinet and the saxophone. Oboe, I thought. Sure. How hard can it be? And they told me there weren’t a lot of oboists, and I would be able to go to school, and would get all the solos.
But then I got to university, with my oboe Theophilus in tow, and learned that yes, it is easy to get into university on oboe, but no, it is not easy after that. I had to learn to make reeds, and my poor splitter-mangled fingers cried at me, and my bank account wept tears of hundreds of dollars at the news of my cane consumption–hundreds of dollars of cane which turned into shockingly few actual reeds.

You know what, though? It wasn’t even the reeds. It wasn’t the hours upon hours of my life wasted in a small, crowded room with no windows. It wasn’t the endless failure of sharpening my knives. It wasn’t the inexplicably flappy sides, or the broken shaper tip, or the shredded tips and hacked-off corners. It wasn’t finally cracking after hundreds of failures and burning down the school.

Okay, maybe it was the reeds. No, I don’t think I need counselling. I’ve taken up composing, you see. It will be a great relief after the oboe.

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