So Mr. B. comes hustling out of school Monday afternoon with the announcement that he wants to have a yard sale of his old toys. Oh, yes? He says the reason is he needs to raise money for an electric guitar. He also wants to buy a drum set for the co-leader of his new band, The Bad Boys, possibly spelled Boyz but Mr. B. isn’t much of a speller yet, as he is just learning to read and write.
So the notion of him playing an electric guitar seemed farfetched. But he was ready with an answer. His co-leader has a ukulele and he will teach it to Mr. Boy, who figures the leap from ukulele to electric guitar can’t be very wide. After explaining this he more or less forgot about it and went off and did something else entirely. But later when I asked which toys he wanted to sell, he insisted that Ms. Ellie, also known as the precocious pachyderm, would not be included, nor would any of the other stuffed animals. What he had in mind was the Wendy’s prizes, the movie tie-in stuff, all of it klunky and quickly forgettable.
Which brings me to the serendipitous moment of the day when, wandering First Things, a favorite blog, I came across this piece about the greatest uke player of this age or any other which comes with a link to a 4-minute, 32-second Youtube performance of the title of this post by the artist, the incomparable Jake Shimabukuro, a twenty-nine-year-old from Hawaii. Jake soars where six-year-olds (and the rest of us) can only dream of going.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 