El Kabong Saved My Life

So, imagine you were 7 years old, and someone put into your hands the tool that would define your entire existence. What if it was something that you had never even thought to ask for?

Christmas, 1977, Santa brought me a real Ukelele. Not a plastic one. A real wooden one. I don’t know why. I had asked for tinker toys.

My mother was a music teacher, and my very early childhood was full of things that made sound. We had a xylophone, an auto harp, a French horn, a trombone, and a harmonica so big that even my mother had to hold it with two hands. With the entry of each new instrument into the house, we would repeat the same pattern: I would be fascinated with it and obsessively try to learn to play it. This would last for a few days before my extremely noise sensitive, high strung mother would crack, and the instrument would ‘have to go back to school.’

I’m pretty sure the uke would have disappeared as well if it wasn’t for Hanna Barbara. That ukelelle was out of its box for about four hours before my little sister snuck up behind me with it and split my head open with it, yelling “EL KABOOOONG!” and shattering the body into pieces. (From about 1976 to I think 1984, somebody got a concussion at our house every Christmas day - no lie.)

What followed next, is I think, a perfect example of the conflict and ambivalence my mother suffered through over life in general and parenthood in particular. I still haven’t really puzzled out what she meant by it, but to make up for the lost uke, I was given my first guitar the next month for my seventh birthday.

This was a weird gift for a whole buffet of reasons:

1) I don’t think I even knew what a guitar was at that point, and I certainly hadn’t asked for it. I had asked for tinker toys, but those had ‘too many parts.’

2) She really was high strung. Noise of any kind set her teeth on edge. She was a public school music teacher and came home from work every with the shot nerves of a Vietnam tunnel rat and required almost total quiet. People who visited my childhood home recall it as ‘tomblike’ in its silence.

3) She LOATHED, and I mean LOATHED anything that wasn’t opera

3b) She loathed even more fiercely, the guitar. She thought it was a hillbilly instrument, fit only for Okies.

4) It was so much bigger than the uke, that my sister really could have killed me with it, rather than just given me my mild Christmas Concussion.

This year is the first time I ever thought to consider who I might be if I'd gotten the damn tinker toys.