In fourth grade, I was forced to pick an instrument.

Kennedy Elementary’s gym was adorned with little practice hubs, and my music class went station to station to try the drums, trumpet, xylophone, etc. 

I wanted to play the drums but wound up enrolled in the school band equipped with a used saxophone I was told was very expensive. $875, if I remember right, which still seems like a small fortune and a ridiculous investment for a ten-year-old who literally could not care less about playing a saxophone. I hadn’t even heard Coltrane yet. The only sounds I could create were the kinds of fork-on-a-plate screeches that made my ears bleed. 

Years I ‘played’ this thing. Daily practiced times were enforced under threat of Nintendo removal. The first song I remember playing that sounded like an actual song to me was Pomp and Circumstance. I’d played Twinke Twinkle Little Star and Mary Had a Little Lamb, but those didn’t feel like songs to me. Certainly didn’t feel like an endpoint for the squeaky saliva-world I was drowning in day after day. (If you’ve ever played a woodwind, you know the slobber involved in getting the reed just right.)

But the first time I nailed that graduation song, the ring-walk song for Macho Man Randy Savage, I felt like a real musician, albeit a miniature, unskilled musician. 

I’m sure Dylan Carlson has felt like a real ballplayer before, but today, he is blasting a flawless rendition of Pomp and Circumstance as he graduates the stash list alongside Spencer Howard, Lewin Diaz, Alec Bohm and Jorge Mateo.