This past weekend I was gifted the opportunity to play my trumpet at Easter services at a local church. It had been quite a while since I'd done any serious trumpet playing in public, and late last year I decided I was going to "get back into the game" as Roy Hobbs says in The Natural.

I made contact with a couple local community bands last December. One of them sounds really good, the other sounds really bad (I decided to stick with the one that sounds really good for obvious reasons.) Well, that connection led to someone who had gotten sick and needed a last-minute replacement to send out an email to some people, and I was available (to play trumpet - on Easter - no small feat.)

I was planning on singing in the choir at the Presbyterian church where I usually go, but I was able to work it out with the music director there to make it work. Why I was not hired by the Presbyterian church, who always hires brass players for Christmas and Easter, I don't know for sure, but that's just the way it worked out. 

And I'm glad it did work out because at this Easter gig I was able to make some new connections - not to mention play in an amazing "hall" as I call the sanctuary where we played the services. 

Not that long ago this would have been "just a gig" where I show up, play my notes, collect my check and go home to prepare for the next thing that suited my inflated sense of self-importance as a musician and a human being. But significant time away from something you love gives one a different perspective on things. I wasn't able to get involved in the music scene where I live due to splitting time between the U.S. and Vietnam for years. Now that we're here on a more permanent basis, I can do some things I wasn't able to do before - like be around long enough to get to know some local players to the point I'm getting calls for gigs. 

Things like that don't just happen. There's a whole process of ingratiating one's self in a well-established ecosystem like a local music scene. And when small things like this past weekend happen, you don't take them for granted. When something is missing from your life, you tend to appreciate it, view it differently then when it was common.

I was telling my wife and son on the way to the service Sunday morning (at 7 am) how fortunate I felt to be able to do something well enough not only to be appreciated by other people, but to get paid for it. I used to take that for granted, now not so much. 

Just one of the ways perspective changes with age and experience. And for the record, I played really well on Sunday and made an impression on a few people that might be able to help get more gigs in the future. I'm not bragging, I'm simply setting the stage for a future email.

Moral of the story: Experience begets awareness and perspective previously not perceived :)