I Sailed with Magellan Read Free

viaduct at the end of our street.
    â€œThat’s what I’m talking about. It’s there all the time. It kept me company when I was in .” He didn’t say in the army or in the war or in Korea or in the POW camp or in the VA hospital. Just in , and that was the only time he even mentioned so much as that.
    When I brought the clarinet home, it caught my mother by surprise. She’d suspected Lefty had pawned his horns in order to pay his bar tabs and gambling debts. I didn’t tell her he was leaving for California. I asked if I could keep it, and she said maybe. Maybe Uncle Lefty would give me a lesson sometime, she said, but it was better not to ask him because he didn’t need that kind of pressure right now. Maybe I should think of it as simply taking care of his clarinet for him until someday maybe he’d want to play it again himself.
    I promised her that if he ever did, I’d give it back. I meant it, too, because I couldn’t understand why somebody who was once in the Bluebirds and could play for people on an instrument like that golden saxophone would ever stop playing. I thought that if I could play a horn like that, I’d never give it up no matter what happened. I knew I’d never stop singing.
    Â 
    Yet all it took to end my career was Sister Relenete, who during my first choir practice stopped the choir in the middle of “Silent Night,” looked directly at me, and asked, “Who is singing like a tortured frog?”

    It was a shock: the shock of humiliation. After my command performances of “Old Man River” just a few years earlier, I’d joined the Christmas Choir in third grade expecting to be a star. Those rounds with Uncle Lefty had left me feeling special. I was a standout all right, but for the wrong reason. It was an awakening of a kind I hadn’t had before, but I grasped it immediately, not doubting for a moment that the nun’s appraisal was right. I wasn’t prone to blushing, but I felt the hot, dizzying rush of blood to my face. Sister Relenete directed us to begin again, and this time I moved my lips, only pretending to sing. After a few bars Sister Relenete signaled a pause and said, “Much better!”
    I never returned to choir practice. I didn’t fall silent though. Stifled song can assume so many shapes. Instead of being a singer, I became a laugher. Not that it occurred to me then that clowns are, perhaps, failed singers. All it would take to set me off was some odd little thing: Denny “the Fish” Mihala’s answer in fourth grade to Sister Philomena’s question “If birds come in flocks, and fish in schools, what other kinds of groupings can you name?”
    Mihala’s hand shot up and he said, “A dozen donuts!”
    It wasn’t the first time one of Mihala’s answers broke up the class. Once, during a spelling exercise, he was asked to use the word thirsty in a sentence. It was a fateful question, one that would earn him his nickname, a question he seemed utterly stumped by. He looked frantically around the classroom for help, then pointed at the goldfish bowl and said in his thick Chicago accent, “Da fish are tirsty.”
    When Fish answered “A dozen donuts,” even Sister Phil smiled momentarily, then she shushed the class and said, “Thank you, Denny, very original thinking, but the question was more about groups of animals. What about cows or wolves?”
    Fish stared mutely at her.
    Camille Estrada raised her hand and said, “A pack of wolves, a
herd of wild horses, a pride of lions, a swarm of locusts, a pod of dolphins …”
    The lesson moved on, but I couldn’t let go of such moments. They kept replaying the way an insult or a slight lodges in the mind of someone with a temper—probably the way that Uncle Lefty replayed the fight in which Bobby Vachata broke his tooth, depriving Lefty, in a single blow, of his natural inclination