In the Zone of Proximal Development

Winding its way up a gentle, tree-lined hill behind the house, a foot path beckoned the blonde boy who was coming through the weeds along the creek one morning in the 1960s. The last day of third grade passed a week ago, a sad day for him, marking the start of a long, sticky, lonely summer. He would spend many of his upcoming waking hours in the shade of the trees in a clearing at the crest of the hill where the foot path ended, where he had built a fort from the wreckage of a billboard a tornado had obliterated the previous summer.

He’d seen a funnel cloud whip through the ravine, roaring like a train, spinning objects like toy tops, alert to high danger, oblivious of the treasure it was bringing him. Miscellaneous pieces of billboard were scattered all along Route 6, building material for a fort. In the clearness of morning he and his friend Bobby stashed broken plywood, splintered posts, ripped sheets of tin, etc., under the bridge for safekeeping and hauled them to the crest of the hill over several days. The long trek past and around White Rock, a granite boulder the size of a small car dropped into a forest they said belonged to the Indians, led to the flat field on higher ground which had been logged and cleared for houses. Years later, when reading the book, the blonde boy would visualize the rabbits in Watership Down holed up in the mounds of broken trees.

Slices of billboard lashed together served as a roof. Wall posts came from living trees fortuitously growing in the rough shape of a room wrapped around with a roll of rusted wire secured from the creek to the north where the Browns owned a farm. The wire kept varmints and critters out, he thought, so that he could bring tomatoes and other vegetables from the garden his father planted in the flat area.

The blonde boy was on a mission this summer, a mission inspired by George Stanley, the music teacher for the two elementary schools and the junior high school in town. Third grade, he could join the school band. At first he wanted to play trumpet or oboe, based on snippets of sound Mr. Stanley played on a tape when he visited his classroom. But then there was the cost of a rental instrument. He was happy to stand up for drums. There was no rental instrument. Instead, there was a one-time purchase of a practice pad and a pair of drumsticks—Ludwig 2B. He lost one stick but managed to hold onto the other to this day.

Mr. Stanley held sectionals every Wednesday morning before school for his drummers, serious lessons during which he taught them to read snare drum music. He was a stickler for strict sticking. His musicians had to hold the sticks properly—turning a doorknob with the left hand, cracking a whip with the right. He taught them time signatures, 1-e-&-ah, whole notes and half notes and quarter notes, eighths and sixteenths, grace notes, flams, and he observed them carefully to ensure they knew how to practice properly—no pounding, no smacking, no thudding, no mindless banging, but crisp wrist movements which channelled the bead on each stick to strike the drum pad smartly and bounce back in a predictable arc.

The blonde boy learned to focus during sectionals on the tempo laid down by a metronome, the baton in Mr. Stanley’s hand. Mr. Stanley demanded metronomic commitment. Because the blonde boy had no metronome to discipline him at home, he learned to pulse the tempo through his body during sectionals so he could feel the beat, and then he carried the tempos home in his hands and arms and head to the billboard fort in the clearing. Most of the drummers brought their pads to the sectional except for one lucky boy, who brought his snare drum and stand. The sounds of the snare mixed with the rubbery pad tones and the click of the metronome to produce a driving cadence that lured the boy measure by measure through the exercises. Mr. Stanley swayed as if he were dancing.

Over the course of the school year the boy amassed sheets of snare drum music ranging from daily exercises to graded solos written for organized drum competitions. The boy practiced five-stroke rolls and paradiddles all summer long. When he had juice in a nine volt battery, he played rhythms along with songs on his transistor radio. When he got his hands on a 3 and 1/4 inch tape recorder, he recorded songs from his radio and practiced with tapes. His mother saw that her blonde boy seemed to like music and did what she could—birthdays, Christmas, shaving pennies here and there—to get him things he needed. A year or two passed when the boy got a shoeshine kit and made a little money in the evenings in the bars and the bowling alley and the cigar shop on Main Street.

Over the next four years, until his family moved to a larger town nearby with a much more resourced and developed music curriculum, he spent countless hours in his billboard fort, practicing on his pad, fiddling with his guitar, also reading books from the town library, eating vegetables from the garden according to the season, and writing fictional stories. Mr. Stanley hosted sectionals, and when he entered fourth grade, the boy joined the school band and played in concerts—variety shows on Fridays, winter and spring concerts in the school auditorium, ice cream socials in the town park.

The family move to what the boy viewed as a big city—a town of 20,000 inhabitants seven miles away—during eighth grade brought with it a whole new zone of proximal development with a miraculous increase in the number and variety of more expert others to scaffold his growth as a musician and as a writer, his other ambition. His life centered on music in school and out, he started to read fiction like a fiend, he dedicated three years to looking up every unfamiliar word he came across in real time—a symptom of an eclecticism that drove him for decades. By the way, the blonde child as an old man would not recommend such an abuse of the dictionary—take Latin instead.

After he graduated from college in the mid-1970s, he stopped playing drums cold turkey. For three decades. But when he sat on a drummer’s throne during a random moment again sometime around the turn of the century, he could still turn a doorknob with his left hand, crack a whip with his right, bounce a bead crisply off the skins. He could still play.