Sharon got me some Bose sound-cancelling headphones for my sabbatical year, a rig that I plugged into my iPhone’s “White Noise” app, so I could plug away in noisy places, serenely listening to heavy rain or the clickety-clack of old train. They served me well in a variety of coffee shops, public libraries, and fast-food restaurants. They still do.

So this morning, I was working away on my essay for a volume in “apologetical aesthetics,” sufficiently oblivious to what was going on around me. Tuned up with a London Fog (a drink my daughter introduced me to, one with tea, hot milk, and vanilla syrup), I’d made good progress and was packing up when I spied a hard-sided case at the foot of a nearby table. 

It stirred strong memories of a decade in school bands (junior high through college), a time when I was regularly around just such instrument cases, smaller than the one I used as a trumpet player, much smaller than the one holding sousaphones, and larger than the one the flutists used. Yes, a clarinet case, the kind carried by the first girl I ever kissed. (I’ll spare you that story.)

We brass players always envied the woodwinds since, if they messed up, they could always look at their reeds to see (or pretend to see) what went wrong. Our mouthpieces were crafted from unchanging metal, so blame always fell to us when we cracked a note. And talk about excuses, how about those double reeds, the oboes and bassoons? They were always monkeying with their reeds, shaving, adjusting, and moistening the wood. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t trade our relatively commanding instruments for theirs, even wondering at times if they were playing at all, even though we could see them chopping away at their forest of keys.

So back to the coffee shop. Though that couple might well have said, “Mind your own business,” they were happy to talk about the case and the connections. Turns out, he was an ex-Marine (Excuse me, “a Marine”) who was donating his old clarinet to her nonprofit— Instruments of Joy (instrumentsofjoy.org)—whose mission is “to provide quality musical instruments to musicians in need,” a work that sees hundreds of clarinets, trumpets, snare drums, and such sent out annually to a host of nations, including our own. It was a joy to get this story, and more evidence that striking up conversations with strangers can be a lot of fun, gratifying and informative for all parties involved.

In this case, I mentioned that I once played in a band with Bill Clinton. (Not a combo, but an Arkansas All-State Band, he being two years my elder and on tenor sax rather than trumpet.) Later on, we crossed paths a couple of times—when he visited a political philosophy class at my college, Ouachita, and when we both attended a Little Rock fund-raiser for the IMB’s missionary training center in Virginia. He was there at the behest of his pastor, W. O. Vaught of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, I as pastor of First Baptist Church, El Dorado. After the Ouachita visit, he headed to Oxford with a Rhodes Scholarship, and from there, he wrote me in 1969, part of his ongoing effort to gather “Friends of Bill.” I kept that letter, and, in the early 1990s, I saw in Newsweek that some fellow had sold a presidential letter. So I checked out the possibilities and ended up getting $850 for mine. So, though I wasn’t a political supporter, I do have him to thank for that.

I lettered in some sports along the way—basketball in junior high, tennis in high school, swimming and tennis in college—but I cherish those band days above all. In fact, we loved our public school director, Bill Clark, so much that we brought him back from New Mexico (where he directed bands at Eastern New Mexico State) to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where we had a “Mr. Holland’s Opus” weekend, with a generation of his students coming together for rehearsals, a banquet, and a concert. A huge influence, with great memories stirred when I saw that clarinet case near me on the floor.