A Different Drummer

One of my favorite books is Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a strange man from all accounts. A New Englander by birth and a difficult person by nature, Thoreau wrote beautifully about the physical environment without and the mental/spiritual environment within, two subjects that fascinate me (and always have). Among many other things he wrote in his famous book is this: "If a man does not keep with the pace of his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

It's not easy being a different drummer, but people need to hear a different drummer's music even if they don't or can't step to it.

My friend Mike is such a drummer. An art teacher (and former science teacher) at a conservative private school, he visited today and gifted me with a PVC flute and a sheet of directions. He has crafted more than 300 of these instruments for a Chapel talk tomorrow morning, in which he intends to wax eloquent about his Burning Man (he's going to wear a lit candle on his head) this past summer and about his belief that there's more than the One Truth to which many of his students and fellow faculty adhere. When he opens his long white robe, 300+ flutes will fall out, so everyone will leave with one means of making his or her own music.

Mike certainly makes his own music: he wears a long ponytail most men shaved off before the '70s ended and sports beautifully complicated Saipan tatoos from hips to ankles, compliments of his own tatooing. He likes to push buttons. He used to make clay dinosaurs, and before that he played Professor P. T. Pickens on a children's TV show called Mrs. Cabobble's Caboose. Now he just clowns around for real.

Sometimes I worry that one of his pushed buttons will explode a bomb, but he never has that worry.

And that's a music I suspect I'll never be able to hear.