BLOWING HIS OWN HORN

I like to believe that I rub shoulders mostly with pretty tolerant people. Hey, why can’t we all just get along? But I was a minor party to an incident last week that has left me wondering.

The incident started when I was meeting with a student in my office. Suddenly one of my colleagues appeared in the doorway, stepped over the threshold, blew a brief flourish on a shiny brass cornet, and then darted back to wherever he had come from. Was I at a loss for words? I sure was! And so was the student . . . but we both took the moment in stride—well, actually sitting down—and went on with our meeting . . .

A short while later, I heard my colleague practicing scales on his cornet behind his closed office door, which is only about 10 yards from my office. English Departments can foster all sorts of eccentricities among its faculty, but this musical “prelude and étude” (as it were) was a first in my 26 years of haunting those particular hallowed hallways. Whatever . . .

But apparently not “Whatever . . .” for some others in the vicinity! For, another short while later, my colleague paused in the midst of marching purposefully down the hallway and told me that our office manager had phoned him to say that there had been “a complaint” about his cornet-playing and to ask would he please cease and desist. Working himself up to a state of Swiftian saevo indignatio in my doorway, he continued on his way, calling back over his shoulder, “Well, I’m going to register a complaint with the office manager about whoever registered a complaint about me!”

Another extremely short while later, he stood in my doorway for the third time in about 20 minutes, this time with his proverbial tail between his legs. “It turns out,” he reported with downcast spirit, “that there were four complaints about my playing . . .”

Well, we had a good laugh about it all a few nights later, and he explained that he had brought his cornet to work because he had a thirteen-hour day on campus—a morning meeting and then nothing on the docket before an evening class—and figured he could get in some serious practice on his scales for his lesson the next day. Poor guy: I suspect that taking up the cornet doesn’t even rate on the chart of questionable midlife crisis activities, yet he gets chastised simply for blowing his horn. . . . I guess the real lesson learned from this incident is what we all know already about life in an English Department: “Everyone’s a critic . . .”