Life on the Farm

When I was young, I never could have imagined that someone would have paid for my flight, hotel and all my meals to travel to Italy. And that once there, I’d get to enjoy wonderful people and great food in restaurants and then get paid yet more money, in fact, more than I earn working at my school. To do what? 

To teach people how to slap their own bodies and make animal sounds in precise musical patterns. 

On the real farm, the squawking animals get the farmer out of bed at ungodly hours to feed the chickens, stack the hay and milk the cow. Me, I just get to sing a song about it. The real farmer goes on to feed slop to the pigs, work on the tractor, plow the fields. I just get to go over to the xylophones and play some simple parts to accompany the song. Back on the real farmer, people are out in the field together picking the corn or working with their neighbors to build a barn. My neighbors go off in small groups to create a barnyard of animal sounds based on rhythm patterns I had taught. 

I have great respect and gratitude for farmers doing the work to bring food to my table, but listening to these music teachers share their barnyard-sound musical creations with such humor, I couldn’t help but think:

I love my job.