Madison Gets A New Drum Set

Madison sold his old drum set and bought a new, bigger one. It has two bass drums, which means it will thump twice as loud as the old one, which only had one. He started drumming when he was nine and is now, at 16, a pretty good drummer. He’s pretty serious about it, too, and I told him I thought that was a good thing.

“When I was your age I had a guitar,” I said. “But I didn’t take it seriously. I just diddled around with it. I never bothered to learn more than three or four chords. I didn’t do all that well in school, either.” Then I looked at him very seriously. “If I was your age again and could do it all over again I would and I would try a lot harder, too,” I said. “I would do my absolute best.”

“You would do better in school?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Absolutely not! I’d slack off on the school work totally and put all of my energies into being a rock star. Math homework? That just eats into practising time. Besides, I haven’t used algebra once since I got out of school. But I could have been a really good guitar player if I’d only focused on it more. Don’t get me wrong; if I could do it all over again I would definitely graduate from high school – that’s always a good thing to do – but I’d just barely scrape by with a 50. My guitar chops, however, would be pretty slick.”

“I’d like to be a rock star,” Madison said, enthusiastically.

“Well, you better hunker down and get really serious about it then,” I told him. “You’ve got to have priorities and school will have to come third.”

“Third?"

“At your age girls are always second,” I told him, sounding like a wise old man, “especially if you want to be a rock star. If you want to be an accountant then school has to come first. If you want to be a rock star it’s the music. But girls are always second, no matter what, so – naturally – school has to be third. And it is true that girls like rock stars better than accountants, which gives you an edge over the competition.”

“Really?"

“Sure,” I said. “If you’re a rock star you can write a song about a girl and it can become a big number one hit. Chicks love that, and the fact is that accountants just don’t write songs about girls.”

Madison suddenly looked worried. “What do I tell my math teacher if he says I’m not reaching my potential?”

“Potential in what?” I said, almost laughing. “Ask him to define ‘potential’ and then twirl your drumsticks in front of his face. Then sign your workbook and give it to him. Tell him to hang on to it. Tell him it might be really valuable one day in the future.”

“It will?”

“You bet,” I said. “Buddy Holly’s high school notebooks are worth a fortune. One sold at an auction a few years back for more money than most people make in a lifetime, and it was particularly valuable because Buddy had made guitar doodles in the margins of the pages – which if you ask me proves he was slacking off in class and really concentrating hard on being a big rock star, which he did become. It’s just too bad the guy who looked after his plane didn’t concentrate equally as hard on being a good mechanic.”

Madison said, “We’ll have to finish this conversation later, dad. I’ve got a math test to study for.”

I frowned. “Math test, shmath test,” I said, almost spitting the words out. “Haven’t you been listening to anything your old man’s been saying? Forget about math start getting serious about your future! Get downstairs and start playing your drums now!”