The Butterfly Effect
When I was 9, my dad went to an auction with his uncle1 and bought, seemingly on a whim 🦋, an antique piano. I would like to reflect on how this has changed the course of, if not the world, at least my life and many people around me.
I was a fat little kid that didn't have a lot of friends, and I was socially awkward and unsure of myself. I wasn't gifted at sport and while I was good at school, I had not found whatever my "thing" was. When dad brought home the piano, my mother decided that it was not very useful to have a piano if nobody could play. We got a few recommendations for piano teachers and ended up choosing 🦋 to take lessons with Mrs. Rogers.
Mrs. Rogers was a wonderful woman, kind, bubbly, full of joy, and a great teacher. Within a lesson or two, she decided to choose 🦋 a particular teaching method with me, and a different one with my sister. She had a knack of making teaching fun, and never used any kind of negative feedback, relying only on the joy that she clearly took when we succeed at what she was teaching us to instill in us a love of making music. At the end of each school year, she would encourage all of her students to play in a recital. It was not required, but I decided to do so 🦋 and I found that I quite enjoyed performing in front of people.
Time, obviously, continued, and I grew and entered high school, and I signed up for music classes 🦋 mostly because I thought it would be easy credits. I showed up and picked an instrument to learn, the Baritone / Euphonium, which I again chose mostly on a whim 🦋. Our high school music teacher was Mr. Zinck, who encouraged me to join the high school band, which I did 🦋. Later in high school, he also encouraged me to join the choir; I was no singer, but I figured, "why not?" 🦋 and joined up.
I bought a guitar - it was a long planned event that I saved up for, and I started by buying a crappy El Degas bass 🦋 that was a pretty bad call, but I ended up loving playing bass. I shortly after also bought a pretty great acoustic guitar, though I honestly only chose that particular brand because it was a cool red colour 🦋. I did not know how to play guitar at all, but Mrs. Rogers and Mr. Zinck had given me the most important tools, which was an understanding of music, and I taught myself how to play.
I met my first girlfriend via the music programme. She played sax and sang in the choir. We dated for some months and broke up. My second girlfriend was also very into music at school, and we started performing together in coffee shops; she introduced me to a bunch of different musical artists2 that I still treasure and play to this day 🦋.
Our high school was in Fergus, a very Scottish little town, and we wore kilts and looked very sharp, and when I was in Grade 13, we took a band trip to Scotland. It was a wonderful trip filled with a lot of music, but I was also 18 and deeply stupid, and it was filled with so much beer. One night I had what would turn out to be one of the craziest nights of my life, which involved getting thrown out of the same bar multiple times 🦋, accidentally stealing from a bakery 🦋, witnessing a friend getting absolutely bludgeoned with a hard loaf of bread 🦋, gifting my underwear to an older scottish lady who had run her hand up my kilt to figure out if I was wearing any 🦋, and in a variety of ways losing the respect of various classmates and souring friendships and tanking my relationship with the girl I was dating 🦋. However, the biggest thing to come from this crazy night happened after the first time I got thrown out of a bar for causing a ruckus. I was standing outside considering my options and I saw a girl sitting on the nearby bridge, dangling her legs out over the river and crying. I walked over and spoke to her for 15 minutes. Over the course of the conversation she told me that she had been considering jumping, and by the end of our conversation she decided not to, because someone took an interest 🦋.
I do not know what ever became of her, but I think I was in the right place at the right time, all because of music 🦋.
Moving on, I went to university and met a bunch of people, often via music. A friend was in a musical and needed someone to play piano, so I signed up. During the course of that musical3, I bought a bass guitar from one of the other band members, just because it was a good deal and because I had won a small amount of money from a lottery ticket 🦋. Shortly after that, a friend of mine introduced me to a guy who wanted to start a band, and since I had just bought a bass, I elected to play bass for them. I was in the band for 7 years, and met one of my best and closest friends as a result 🦋, and made a whole bunch of pretty great music4.
When I was about 25 or so, a couple of friends I had were leaving Guelph to move to Toronto and I attended a house warming party for the couple in the new place. I was coming from an open mic and had my acoustic guitar with me 🦋, which I absolutely could not leave in my crap car. Over the course of the party several of us were coerced into singing and playing guitar for the group 🦋. There was a beautiful woman there that I was interested in, but while we chatted for quite a while at the party, at no point did I work up the nerve to ask for her number. I went home, opened my guitar case to play, and found a lovely hand written letter from the beautiful woman, talking about how connected people were and how random events can bring people together 🦋.
We have been together for 20 years.
1 - Uncle Roy was a wonderful man. My bonus grandfather, he was married to my dad's mother's sister, Aunt Ruby who was, as you may guess, my bonus grandmother. Uncle Roy was a phenomenal woodworker and tinker, and he instilled in my father a love of working with his hands, and the ability to solve problems. I feel like that is something that my own father also passed no to me, albeit in a bit of a different way, as I am not half the Carpenter my father is, but am a million times the programmer that he is. Tradeoffs.
2 - most notably Jewel and Ani DiFranco. I still play "You Were Meant For Me" by Jewel and "Both Hands" by Ani pretty frequently.
3 - A Chorus Line was the musical, and as a fun fact, my wife remembers going to see it, and the musical I was the conductor for the following year, "Crazy For You".
4 - Lucky Number Ten is the band we were in. Remnants remain online of us playing together; some videos and an mp3 here or there.