What the heck was I thinking??? There are a ton of kids around here. Small ones, large one and inbetween ones and most of them are real hoodalums. It is a very poor area and a place where both parents work and most kids are left on their own and most are out of controll. Now I like kids, and I always give them the benafit of the doubt even though the odds are against me. I fix their bikes and go carts and that kind of stuff because I have the tools and can do it. When they are in my house they are into my whistles, (flutes are off limits) I have given away quite a few only to find that they ended up bent in two or used for god only knows what purpose. Well…I finaly got my hands on a whitecap mouth piece for my Oak. Now this Oak I have had for 25 years and it lived with all my other cheepies in my tobbacco can whistle planter. I went to get it today and IT WAS GONE. I just couldnt believe it. I know who stole it and I should just rip his guts out but it doesnt do much good. He doesnt have much chance of making it into high school with out a record and I realy had written him off as a lost cause. There are a couple of kids that I realy think deserve all the help I can give them to learn how to be respectable human beings, he is not one of them. Any way, jeez I was P Oed. This was finaly going to make that Oak worth playing. Isn`t it weird, I would almost have prefered that he stole my Parkhurst (ya right) So I will never know how good that old Oak could have sounded. I put the whitecap on a Feadog and it was transformed into a thing of beauty, just think what it would have done with that Oak. And so it goes.
I am sorry to hear about your problem. I remember being a pain in the rear kid. I did lots of things I have regretted. I also remember NOT doing lots of things I regretted as I was growing up.
One of those things was getting more involved in music. I am doing it now. Who knows, maybe he this person has the whistle and they are actually trying to figure out how to play it??? Now wouldn’t that burn your socks off.
awwww tom…I am very sorry for you.
but as you can hope for the best, that boy indeed might have fancied your whistle because he wanted to learn to play ???
that kind of kids do things like that just to get attention because they don’t get the love at home they need so badly so ANY kind of attention is seen as surrogate love by them.
how about talking to him?
Yea, don’t be confrontational, but do ask him about it. Be like “You know that whistle you borrowed from me? How are you doing with that?” Maybe offer to teach him a few simple tunes. You never know…
In the future though, if there’s anything you’d be particularly upset about losing, keep it in a drawer…
I wonder if you were to tell a couple of the kids whose stuff you’ve fixed what had happened, if your whistle might not reappear soon.
Of course, I know it’s not really the whistle you’re worried about.
There are good kids out there. Sometimes finding them can be the challenge. And there are many not-so-good kids who grow up into good adults.
And there are some really bad kids. Especially the kids that develop a taste for cruelty–some of those kids wind up in jail for most of their lives, having done horrible things.
You’re a good man, Tom…maybe even if they don’t seem to be, maybe some of these kids are learning a little bit about what it means to be a good person, just by interacting with you.
You are all right of course and I was just venting a little bit. It was, after all, just a 10 dollar whistle. I am lucky enough to be allowed to share in the lives of some of the kids around here. I don`t talk to them as if they were the kids and I was the adult. (i never graduated from adult school) but more as just another guy. So I have become someone they can confide in other then an athority figure. They are also not used to being treated with respect and little do they know that I am constantly working on them. Very much the way I train draft horses. Mutual respect. I just get disapointed sometimes. But the richness they add to my life far out ways the trouble they cause. And yes James I could put the word out to some of the others but that would be breaking the code.
Take care
