Whenever people think of the 2020s in the future, they’re going to think of the pandemic. It was a worldwide phenomenon. No matter where you go, you’re going to be able to ask someone what they did during the pandemic, and how it affected them, and you’re going to get a unique story.
My son was an essential worker — he worked in a grocery warehouse, and he was like that little string you hold outside the door to see what the weather is like. If it moves, it’s windy. If it’s wet, it’s raining. If it disappears, it’s the string goblins. Shut the door.
My partner and I worked at home together for the first few months, until his job forced him to go into the office. He’s a chemist; there’s only so much you can do remotely.
Me, after work, I’d practice the mandolin.
There’s just so much time. A lot of people took up new hobbies during the lockdown. The authors I follow on social media wrote those books they never thought would go anywhere. Musicians made groundbreaking stuff. TV did their best, and most creative series and episodes. Jolted out of the everyday tedium by a global panic and contraction, we all tried something new. For me, that was the mandolin.
I play flutes, silver and Irish, and fifes and whistles. The common element for all these things is that they are LOUD, and you cannot play them without everyone wishing you were much further away. You can’t hold a conversation when you’re playing a flute. And neither can anyone else.
The obvious instrument to move to was one that was quiet, melodic, fun, and welcome everywhere — the guitar.
I am still not sure why I didn’t choose to learn guitar.
Maybe it was because I saw myself as a medieval bard, with their lute, traveling from town to town, singing news to people who rarely traveled far themselves. Maybe because I really liked the playing of the mandolinist in the Irish band I was in, back in the day.
I bought this off eBay. It’s a cheap Chinese copy of an old Gibson mandolin. It’s a little dirty because I haven’t changed the strings in awhile. It sounds sweet, it’s easy to tune, and I can play loudly or softly and after just a few years of practice, I can sight read most music at a reasonable pace. I have the pandemic for forcing me to stay home and practice.
Blaugust was another pandemic discovery for me, though I think at that time it was “Blapril”, followed soon after by my first official “Blaugust”.
Blaugust, and the pandemic, were my incentives to come back to blogging, and I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since, with pauses now and again.
So yeah, COVID sucked and continues to suck, but it helped me welcome music and blogging back into my life, and how could that be bad?
