So I promised a friend a story, and you get to read it, too. Let me preface this by saying it really doesn’t have much to do with my weight loss & health journey on the face of it, but in some ways, it does. Grab a beverage and set a spell; this could take a while.

I was 18 or 19 and sharing a house with my mother after my parents’ divorce and an ugly issue with my father, where he pulled me out of college against my will. For a while, the going was tough; not long before that point, I was college-bound with full scholarships, so my life changed abruptly. My personal outlook changed from planning to become a band director to working full time at a department store.

I didn’t — I couldn’t — give up music that easily. While I still had the French horn I played in high school, it wasn’t much of a joy to me to play it alone, especially since it had been my dream. I don’t remember how or why, but somehow, I got my hands on a flute. Other than making music, there’s just not a lot in common between a flute and a horn. A flute, though, was easier to find popular music for, since it’s pitched in C (as opposed to a horn, which is pitched in F), so if I wanted to, I could play along with the radio.

Most times, if I was home alone, I had the stereo on in my room; I could hear it while I did other things, and if something came on the radio that I knew, I would run into my bedroom, grab the flute, and play along.

Until one day — when a Chicago tune came on, and I raced into my bedroom to grab my flute, only to slide in a pile of… dog leftovers, if you get me. Not only did I land on my butt, but I managed to make an even bigger mess than the dog had made. I got up, took care of my dirtied clothing, sighed, and did what any absolutely inexperienced carpet-cleaning teenager would do: I created a science experiment of every household cleaner I could find that I thought might get dog poop out of a rug. And I mixed it up in an empty glass carafe.

Nothing exploded, and I managed to clean the nastiness out of the carpet.

The dog got walked, the carpet was cleaned, and I forgot about the matter.

The next day at lunch, my mother served me homemade soup before I was to head into work on a Saturday. My mother was a decent cook, but that soup tasted a bit off and I could see some sort of oily residue swirling on the top, but good daughters don’t tell mothers that the meal isn’t up to par when they’ve gone through the trouble to make you a meal on their day off. So I shut up and I ate it.

And then I realized that she had used the same carafe that I had used for my home chemistry assignment the day before; she had poured leftovers into the carafe the previous evening, thinking it was clean, but I had just dumped the rest of the chemical arsenal down the kitchen drain and left the carafe to the side without washing it.

We both crossed our fingers that I wouldn’t suffer any after effects, but no such luck; my stomach started barking at me about an hour after I got to work, and I finally went to my supervisor and asked to go home. She was suspicious because (a) I was a teenager and (b) I was asking for the rest of the night off on a Saturday, so she made me call the operations manager for the entire store.

I was honest; I told him the entire story. And when he quit laughing, he said “go home. No one could make up all of that!”

Things I learned: if you’re gonna slide in dog poop and make your own carpet cleaner, follow through and also clean the container. Be nice to your mother, but be honest about her soup. Always tell the truth to your boss. And the flute may not be my instrument; my horn never would have done that to me. 😉

I am very grateful, though, to have returned to music.

In some ways, this is about the journey; while the story is funny now, I was lost in those days, after losing the things that I felt defined me, yet to learn that it’s not about definitions; it’s about possibilities and how we each choose to build our worlds. It’s in our hands. While I’ve faltered a lot between those days and now, I’ve also learned immeasurable amounts about myself. It’s those dimensions that now color my world and make me smile.

PS: I did eventually return to college as a double music major, even though I never did become a band director (or music therapist), but music will always be part of my life.