Take the Cannoli Read Free Page A

going to love this,” he smirks, eyeballing the cannon. “You get to drag this thing up on top of the Gravellies on opening day of hunting season. And looking off at Sphinx Mountain, you get to put me in little paper bags. I can take my last hunting trip on opening morning.”
    I’ll do it, too. I will have my father’s body burned into ashes. I will pack these ashes into paper bags. I will go to the mountains with my mother, my sister, and the cannon. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so that he doesn’t take anyone with him. I will light the fuse. But I will not cover my ears. Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt.

Music Lessons
    IT WAS A UTUMN IN A MERICA , a fine hot Indian summer day. Pretty high school girls sat on bleachers with the sun shining in their pretty hair, watching handsome high school boys play football. And then, it was halftime, which is where I came in.
    I was standing in line in my silver spats down past the end zone waiting to go on. I was in marching band. I had a foot-tall, fake fur black hat, with the vaguely processed food name “shako,” strapped under my chin. The shako’s purpose is to make a scrubby assortment of adolescents look magisterial. But it not only prevented me from breathing, it rendered me and my comrades in the horn section unstable, so that even though my job was to march around as some kind of sick metaphor for teenage military precision, I moved through time and space with the grace and confidence of a puppy walking on a beach ball.
    Because of my double shortage of strength and coordination, I barely passed gym. But somehow, I was supposed to lift a baritonehorn that measured twice my body weight, blow into it while reading microscopic sheet music, step in a straight line while remembering left foot on beats one and three, right foot on beats two and four, and maneuver myself into cute visual formations, like the trio of stick figures we fashioned when we played the theme from My Three Sons.
    Halfway through the halftime program, I had to break formation, drop my baritone horn on the field, and sprint to the fifty-yard line—a long haul—with everyone in the band, the pretty girls in the bleachers, and the football players on the sidelines all watching and waiting, silent and still. At midfield I picked up my mallets and—this is what they had been waiting for—I pounded out a xylophone solo on a little Latin-flavored number called “Tico Tico.”
    My polo shirt–clad nemesis Andy Heap stood up in the stands screaming, “Vowell! Vowell! Whooooo! Whoooo!”, as the laughter of his friends, at me, drowned out the horn section. This was the same Andy Heap, I might add, who earlier in the week in music history class had delivered an oral report on Tchaikovsky’s lady friend, calling her Mimi throughout (even though her name was Nadya). Andy Heap was apparently smart enough to publicly humiliate me during “Tico Tico,” he just wasn’t smart enough to know that the abbreviation “Mme.” stands not for Mimi, but “Madame.”
    I only had a second to stick out my tongue at Andy when I finished “Tico Tico,” because I had to let go of the mallets, rush over to my baritone—again, the freeze-framed spectators, the loneliness of the long-distancerunner—and I’m back in formation with the low brass for the finale.
    I was getting academic credit for this, to wear that uniform to play those songs. I was getting graded. Which begs the question: What exactly was I supposed to be learning? What was marching band supposed to teach me? Because marching isn’t a particularly applicable skill in later life. Here then, some lessons—actually useful ones—I accidentally learned while pursuing music.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON #1: MARXISM FOR TENTH GRADERS
    Once a week, the best band kids played with the