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Dennis Yarnell, Trumpet<\/p>\nDennis Yarnell, Trumpet<\/p>\n
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“Music has always been there.\u00a0 It\u2019s something I come back to.”<\/p>\n
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I grew up in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles.\u00a0 I was one of three boys.\u00a0 My brother Steven was four years older than me and five years ahead of me in school and my brother Tom was thirteen months younger.\u00a0\u00a0 Our house was on a large lot with about ten or twelve different kinds of fruit trees.\u00a0 It was idyllic.\u00a0 I could walk to school and I had all these places to play.<\/p>\n
I had the same friends until I went to college.\u00a0 We were involved in Scouts and I was in musical groups from the time I was in the fourth grade until high school when I got busy being a teenager.\u00a0 The first school band had twelve members.\u00a0 In the fourth grade you could only play the violin but I wasn\u2019t interested.\u00a0 Kids in the fifth grade were allowed to play whatever instrument they wanted to.\u00a0 My mom was very outspoken.\u00a0 She really liked being a mom and she was very proactive, 100% Irish.\u00a0\u00a0 She said to the school people, \u201cMy son wants to play the trumpet.\u00a0 Can you find a way that that can happen?\u201d\u00a0 And so they did.\u00a0 And I was the only trumpet.\u00a0 So, hey!\u00a0 I must be doing the right thing.<\/p>\n
My mom and dad were opposites in a lot of ways.\u00a0 They embodied the two polarities of my own personality.\u00a0\u00a0My dad was a mixture of French and German, probably more German than anything else.\u00a0 He was a CPA and very much a technician, extremely good at writing and numbers and he excelled at his occupation.\u00a0 My mom was very outgoing, a real people person, had a lot of friends and loved to celebrate.\u00a0 She was raised Catholic.\u00a0 Dad was Seventh Day Adventist.\u00a0 Quite different approaches so they settled on taking us to a Presbyterian Church.\u00a0 Kind of a white people\u2019s solution to all that.\u00a0 (laughs)<\/p>\n
I was drawn to music right away.\u00a0 My mom loved music and it was a big event when we got a stereo.\u00a0 She was a stay-at-home mom so she would be cleaning and music would fill the house.\u00a0 After I\u2019d been playing the trumpet for maybe a year at school they got me lessons.\u00a0 The first trumpet teacher I had played the clarinet.\u00a0 He sent me home with a C major scale and he said, \u201cHere, kid, learn this.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s funny by contrast because years later when I was teaching music to elementary school kids, we would get them going on little song books or maybe three to five notes in the song.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t know any different; I just played the C scale and came back the next week.<\/p>\n
So I was in that small band in elementary school and then in junior high we had a proper marching band, played at the football games, the basketball games.\u00a0 It gave me a lot of confidence.<\/p>\n
And I played my trumpet when they raised the flag before school.\u00a0 That was kind of fun.<\/p>\n
I was in a Civil Air Patrol band when I was in middle school.\u00a0 My teacher was the director of that band.\u00a0 It was more serious and he had very high standards.\u00a0 It was a good experience.<\/p>\n
And I was also in a Boys\u2019 Club Band that was taught by one of my band teachers on the other side of town.\u00a0 We had to take a bus to get there.\u00a0 That was my first introduction to diversity because that band was made up of white kids, Black kids, Brown kids, Asians\u2014you name it.\u00a0 And it was all boys.\u00a0 The band director (laughs), he was a patient man.\u00a0 The trumpet section was pretty strong because he was a trumpet player himself.\u00a0 He played in the LA symphony.\u00a0 He had his best students in there and all of a sudden I was pretty far down from the first parts because I was in middle school and they were in high school.\u00a0 That was my last band before Berkeley.<\/p>\n
I was always pretty confident, especially in sports, and did well in school without really trying that hard.\u00a0 In junior high I played basketball and gymnastics and track.\u00a0 In gymnastics I did the floor exercise and the rope climb which in those days was still an event.\u00a0 It was fun.<\/p>\n
In high school I was into tennis and swimming.\u00a0 Stan Smith was on our tennis team.\u00a0 He was a two time grand slam winner.\u00a0 He was one year ahead of me in school.\u00a0 My brother Tom was on the tennis team too.<\/p>\n
I was really in great shape.\u00a0 I remember taking this physical exam that Kennedy had promoted.\u00a0 Out of a school of 1500 boys I scored number four.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s why I\u2019ve really liked watching the American Ninja Warrior programs on TV in the last few years.<\/p>\n
I continue to like sports.\u00a0 I get a lot of value out of it.\u00a0 Today it\u2019s golf.\u00a0 It\u2019s the hardest sport I\u2019ve ever played.\u00a0 It\u2019s ridiculous.\u00a0 Most people who have never played golf don\u2019t realize is that it is an extremely creative game.\u00a0 There\u2019s this exercise that people do.\u00a0 They say, \u201cIf you could go around the golf course with only three clubs, what would they be?\u00a0 Would you have a putter, would you have a driver, would you have an iron?\u00a0 What would you have?\u201d\u00a0 Then they up the ante.\u00a0 \u201cHow about one club?\u201d\u00a0 I mean really!\u00a0 That\u2019ll twist your brain.\u00a0 You can actually putt with a seven iron and do a lot of chipping and get the ball down the fairways.\u00a0 But people putt with woods.<\/p>\n
Music has always been there.\u00a0 It\u2019s something I come back to.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t play in high school but when I was at Berkeley I thought, \u201cHey, it would be fun to play with the UC band.\u201d\u00a0 So I did for one year, enough just to get a taste.<\/p>\n
I was at Berkeley from \u201965 to \u201969.\u00a0 That was just after Mario Savio and in time for the strike.\u00a0 African-Americans promoted this idea of striking.\u00a0 People didn\u2019t go to classes but they held classes off campus.\u00a0 People\u2019s Park–I was in favor of People\u2019s Park.\u00a0 I thought these were reasonable issues.\u00a0 The Vietnam War was going strong.\u00a0 I got comfortable with being at Berkeley and smoking pot and going to demonstrations.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t a leader but I was curious.\u00a0 It\u2019s shocking when you see National Guard with automatic weapons standing on the street corners.\u00a0 I was in the art building one day and I looked out the window at a demonstration and there was a helicopter spraying gas over the campus.\u00a0 That was some experience!\u00a0 \u201cWhat is happening here?\u201d<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t really have a direction.\u00a0 The first two years I took a lot of breadth requirements, signed up for math and science classes and accidentally signed up for some engineering classes and realized that I was over my head.\u00a0 I thought, \u201cWell, I really like art.\u201d\u00a0 In the art department there were more people I could relate to.\u00a0 It worked out much better for me.<\/p>\n
A lot of people in those days were talking about moving to Canada so I got the bright idea, I\u2019m going to go up there to take a look around.\u00a0 I spent a summer in Vancouver living in the YMCA.\u00a0 I fell in love with Vancouver.\u00a0 It\u2019s such a wonderful city.\u00a0 The winter would be pretty hard for me although it\u2019s pretty mild by Canadian standards and the days are short.\u00a0 But in the summer, the days are very long.\u00a0 At 10:30 at night you\u2019re still up!\u00a0 But I came back and got my teacher\u2019s credential at Humboldt State.\u00a0 Such a great change–5,000 students, a small town and I could walk to school.\u00a0 It really appealed to me a lot.<\/p>\n
I thought, \u201cGee, if I\u2019m going to be teaching art, I\u2019ve got to know something about sculpture.\u201d\u00a0 The class I took was held in an auditorium. \u00a0The teacher had an overhead and he was talking about screws and dents and I thought, \u201cWhat the heck, what\u2019s going on here?\u201d\u00a0 It turned out to be a metal sculpture class where you cast aluminum, bronze and iron by using a oil sand method.\u00a0 What a fantastic experience, the best art class I\u2019ve ever taken.\u00a0 We built a cupola.\u00a0 We melted the iron and poured over 3,000 pounds of molten iron in one day into all these molds.\u00a0 Oh my God!\u00a0 Pretty neat.<\/p>\n
The summer after I got my teaching credential I went to Europe like a lot of young people were doing at that time.\u00a0 I was in Ireland for about four days, hitchhiking around the southwest.\u00a0 My mom\u2019s family was from around Cork though at the time I wasn\u2019t so intent at looking up my ancestry.\u00a0 I\u2019ve become more now.\u00a0 When my mom went to Ireland, she was looking for the ancestral home.\u00a0 She asked a local, \u201cMy father\u2019s name and my grandfather\u2019s name was. . . Where is the mountain they were on?\u201d\u00a0 And they said, \u201cOh, that was quarried away.\u201d\u00a0 The landscape had actually changed and she couldn\u2019t find her ancestral home!<\/p>\n
I was in Europe for 82 days. \u00a0It was fantastic.\u00a0 I met Americans and then English people.\u00a0 I would travel with people for a while and then I\u2019d be on my own again, the best mix you can have.\u00a0 I was trying to cover a lot of ground so I would not typically spend a lot of time in any one country.\u00a0 The body is working fine; you don\u2019t mind sleeping on floors, picnic tables.\u00a0 I had a backpack.\u00a0 I went to Greece and Italy, Switzerland.\u00a0 I had a friend in Germany I stopped and visited with.\u00a0 France and a little bit of Spain.\u00a0 More Mediterranean than anything else.\u00a0 Riding the train was fun, a great way to get around.\u00a0 And whatever group I was in I was usually the more grounded person.\u00a0 \u201cWhere is the youth hostel, where are we staying tonight?\u201d\u00a0 Some of my traveling companions were imbibing various distractions that didn\u2019t add to their abilities to find places.\u00a0 I enjoyed it a lot but after a while, \u201cThis is not home.\u201d\u00a0 I spent the last week in an artistic corner of London.<\/p>\n
At that time there were a lot of Baby Boomers like myself coming out of college so the job openings for art teachers tended to be down in the Central Valley.\u00a0 It seemed like a long ways to go and not exactly what I was used to.\u00a0 So for a few years I did a variety of jobs.\u00a0 I worked for Cost Plus Imports as a manager.\u00a0 I sold a bookkeeping tax service.\u00a0 Then in 1973 I heard that they were interviewing teachers to go to Australia.\u00a0 While I was at the interview, the woman got on the phone and I heard her say, \u201cWell, I\u2019ve got our last person of this batch.\u201d\u00a0 And within two weeks I was in Australia.\u00a0 This is how easy it is to do things when you\u2019re single and young.<\/p>\n
The night before we left I went to the consulate and they had little flags on the map of Australia.\u00a0 I could see my name and where I was going but I didn\u2019t know or really care.\u00a0 I ended up in a town of 350 people about 130 miles west of Melbourne in the state of Victoria.\u00a0 The area is a lot like Oregon, sheep country like the Willamette Valley–real green, a little rainy in the winter, pretty warm in the summer, about 60 miles from the coast.<\/p>\n
When you live in a small town and everybody knows everything you\u2019re doing.\u00a0 If I went into the local bakery, the next day the kids would be talking about what I ordered.\u00a0 (laughs)\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t believe it!<\/p>\n
The art I taught was pretty down to earth stuff. \u00a0It was a high school\u2014very conservative.\u00a0 The assistant principal used the paddle and he got a lot of respect from the kids as a result.\u00a0 The principal was working on his PhD so he was in his office and pretty much nonexistent.<\/p>\n
The kids would say to me, \u201cMr. Yarnell, are you going to come out to the shearing today?\u00a0 Y\u2019know, all the kids are going to be there.\u201d\u00a0 And I\u2019d say, \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t really know about that.\u201d\u00a0 People had sheep to take care of and looked upon the whole idea of going to school as amusement.\u00a0 The kids are just going to come back and work on the land anyway.<\/p>\n
It was fun because there was a whole community of teachers and we were all in our twenties and single.\u00a0 We would take trips during the breaks to New Zealand.\u00a0 I spent a month there.<\/p>\n
But there were not a lot of people in the town that I could relate to.\u00a0 And there were not very many outlets for stress that builds up when you\u2019re teaching.\u00a0 When you\u2019re living on a ranch, there\u2019s not really any place to run or exercise.\u00a0 It\u2019s a pretty strange experience.\u00a0 You work hard, you go to school and work with the kids, come home, go to bed . . . round and round.\u00a0 I was ready to go.<\/p>\n
I took some time off after I finished teaching and drove my VW and my tent to the beaches and up to northern Australia where it\u2019s really warm, kind of like Los Angeles without the people.\u00a0 Brisbane is up in the north.\u00a0 It was idyllic.\u00a0 There\u2019s a little river running through the town and there were no tall buildings.\u00a0 Now it has gleaming skyscrapers.\u00a0 The town is very near The Gold Coast which is a popular tourist destination now.\u00a0 I met a young couple from Sacramento when I first arrived.\u00a0 I was dumbstruck.\u00a0 \u201cI came all this way and now I\u2019m meeting you guys from Sacramento?\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019d go to their house for dinner and chop wood.\u00a0 I shared a house with three Australian guys and the rent was $16 for the four of us.\u00a0 (laughs)\u00a0 The guy that owned the place, he just wanted somebody in there so no one would ransack it. \u00a0I had some great experiences there.<\/p>\n
When I came back from Australia I still didn\u2019t really know what I wanted to do.\u00a0 I had been able to save money so I didn\u2019t have to get a job right away.\u00a0 I took a room in a boarding house in Pt. Richmond and met a guy there who had been to Vietnam who was wanted to build a ferro-cement boat.\u00a0 He said, \u201cDo you want to help me build this boat?\u201d and I said, \u201cSure.\u201d\u00a0 We went to Mexico because he was scouting out a place to build it but he would do really stupid things.\u00a0 He was fighting with the people at the hotel because they had his clothes in the laundry and he wanted to leave town and they said they weren’t not done.\u00a0 And about every third person in the street was carrying a gun or wearing a uniform of some sort and I thought to myself, \u201cY\u2019know, this is not a good place to get in any arguments.\u201d\u00a0 I said to my friend, \u201cLook, you can argue with these people but I\u2019m taking a bus back home.\u201d\u00a0 And I did.\u00a0 He was NOT SMART.\u00a0 So that was the end of the ferro-cement boat venture.<\/p>\n
Eventually I got involved with computers because that seemed to be the smart thing to do. \u00a0I went back to school and got the necessary training and got a job with the phone company in \u201981 working on main frame programming, pretty cushy.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a design job.\u00a0 It was maintenance and from that standpoint it was okay but boring.\u00a0 I went to my boss one day and said, \u201cI haven\u2019t had any work for a while.\u00a0 Is there anything coming soon?\u201d\u00a0 He said, \u201cWell, with 90,000 people in the company, we\u2019re usually spending a fair amount of time waiting for the work to come to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
One guy would come back from lunch and stick his feet up on his desk and go to sleep all afternoon.\u00a0 A colleague and I would take long walks around San Francisco because we had nothing to do.\u00a0 It was fun dressing up in a suit and was commuting from Fairfax in Marin by bus and then the ferry but I don\u2019t care how good the pay is, when there\u2019s no work, I\u2019m out of there.\u00a0 You don\u2019t feel good at the end of the day.\u00a0 You\u2019re more tired than anything else.<\/p>\n
Behind the scenes I was getting back into music.\u00a0 I went to the music store and got a new trumpet.\u00a0 Within four days after I quit the phone company I had four new part time jobs involved in music\u2014a before-school band, an after-school band, just a whole variety of stuff.\u00a0 I was making about one tenth as much money but I felt a lot better. \u00a0And the parents were very supportive.\u00a0 They were busy trying to get me a music position in Marin County full time but it just wasn\u2019t going to happen.\u00a0 Everything was already sewed up.\u00a0 People were nice and everything but . . .<\/p>\n
It was also about 1981 when I met Cecelia.\u00a0 A friend of mine who I was sharing a house with ran into her car.\u00a0 They exchanged information and he asked her out for a date.\u00a0 (Laughs)\u00a0 But there were no sparks.\u00a0 But he set up a backpacking trip and invited me along.\u00a0 Cecelia and I ended up in the same car.\u00a0 We got to the trailhead at about five o\u2019clock in the afternoon and started hiking. \u00a0Cecelia was taking her time and\u00a0 I was trying to help her because there was no trail.\u00a0 We had a really nice time and when we got back to town we started going on bike rides and hanging out together.\u00a0 We moved in together within four months and got married within six months from the time we met.\u00a0 I think this is our thirty-ninth year.\u00a0 We\u2019re pretty happy.\u00a0 She\u2019s a little like my dad because she\u2019s very organized and very meticulous about detail and very frugal.\u00a0 So we are echoes of my own parents because I\u2019m very much like my mother, very outspoken, sometimes to a fault.\u00a0 (laughs)\u00a0 That\u2019s the way it is.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve learned to try to keep my mouth shut more as I get older.<\/p>\n
We got a place to live and we were real happy.\u00a0 CC had made a list of all the things she wanted like southern light, a fragrant vine, a wood burning stove, attached garage.\u00a0 This place had everything.\u00a0 It was San Rafael, Crystal Park, and it was in our price range.\u00a0 But then we wanted a larger place because her brother was looking to move in with us part time because he was on the road a lot doing his filming.\u00a0 \u00a0And really wanted to get a full time music job.\u00a0 So I went for an interview and got a job down in the Santa Cruz area in 1988.\u00a0 We lived down there for ten years.<\/p>\n
My dad had suggested, \u201cMaybe you should have a minor in math and a minor in music because you like both of those things.\u201d\u00a0 It was good advice so I got them and frequently throughout my teaching career the principal would say, \u201cOh, we need somebody for so and so\u2019s classroom, would you teach a math or science class?\u201d\u00a0 And they would have me do that as well.\u00a0 When we had a big layoff down in the Pajaro District where I taught near Santa Cruz, I did not get laid off because I had some seniority and I could teach math and art and music.<\/p>\n
I enjoyed Santa Cruz.\u00a0 I got into singing and joined a choir for a while.\u00a0 I really liked that.<\/p>\n
And I was in a men\u2019s group, a nice experience.\u00a0 It was small, about nine members, mostly guys who were having issues with relationships.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure why I joined but I wanted to make some friends besides the people I worked with. \u00a0And I was interested in finding out what a men\u2019s group would be like.\u00a0 I really liked the leader, Tim.\u00a0 He did a good job and it was inexpensive, about $15 a night.\u00a0 We did that for about three or four years with him and another three or four without.\u00a0 We had retreats twice a year.\u00a0 We used to take camping trips, car camping mostly.\u00a0 But people started moving away from Santa Cruz.\u00a0 I\u2019m still in contact with a couple of guys.<\/p>\n
In the meantime Cecelia was not happy down there.\u00a0 She was going through menopause and had a lot of issues with the humidity in a beach town that contributed to her migraines.\u00a0 So I thought, \u201cI\u2019ve had ten years here; it\u2019s her turn.\u201d\u00a0 I asked her, \u201cWhere would you like to live?\u201d and she said, \u201cMarin.\u201d\u00a0 She loves Marin but I said, \u201cThat\u2019s a little bit impossible.\u00a0 How about Sonoma County?\u201d\u00a0 And so I got a job in Healdsburg teaching math for the first year and then teaching music the second year\u00a0in the Oak Grove School District on the west side of Santa Rosa.<\/p>\n
I really enjoyed teaching music.\u00a0 I\u2019d go to the elementary school in the afternoon after spending the morning at the middle school.\u00a0 And I had bands before school and then some during but mainly the kids would come out of classes and we would have sectionals.\u00a0 Being a music teacher is a very curious thing.\u00a0 In the summer I would go in to see which kids and how many kids were signed up for band in the fall.\u00a0 I remember going in one time and the secretary said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got 85 kids signed up for band.\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cThat\u2019s great!”\u00a0 What\u2019d I do?\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 And then the next summer I\u2019d go in and she\u2019d say, \u201cWhat are you doing to those kids?\u00a0 There\u2019s only 23 in band.\u201d\u00a0 So one time you\u2019re a hero and the next time you\u2019re not and I did the same thing both times.<\/p>\n
But I enjoyed it.\u00a0 We were in the Apple Blossom parade a few times.\u00a0 I had award winning jazz bands.\u00a0 It was a new challenge.\u00a0 There were readers and nonreaders.\u00a0 I remember telling a bass player, \u201cThis song is in the key of G.\u201d\u00a0 And he said, \u201cDon\u2019t bother with that.\u00a0 Just start the song and I\u2019ll come in.\u201d\u00a0 We had a lot of good ears.<\/p>\n
One year we had a bass player whose father was a pro.\u00a0 We had a clarinet player whose father was a pro.\u00a0 We had a lot of musicians who would come and help the band.\u00a0 We put together a little rhythm and blues band that was half local pros and half teachers and the kids went nuts.\u00a0 They saw their fifth grade teacher up there singing \u201cSummertime.\u201d\u00a0 And we did an old James Brown version of \u201cI Feel Good.\u201d\u00a0 It was a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
90% of the kids were great.\u00a0 I was pretty good at getting the kids to cooperate.\u00a0 Most of the teachers I got along with.\u00a0 Usually the only person who would be difficult would be the principal or the superintendent.\u00a0 This micromanaging thing, I didn\u2019t like that.\u00a0 I liked being more independent.<\/p>\n
At the time I had inherited almost three quarters of a million dollars in property and cash from my parents and I thought, \u201cDo I really have to do this?\u201d\u00a0 I was 55 and I could retire early and get a pension, so I took advantage of that.\u00a0 That was a nice change.\u00a0 CC and I were able to pay off our house and pay off our cars and pay off student debt.<\/p>\n
It was ironic because I was a bit of a black sheep in the family.\u00a0 Both of my brothers became physicians.\u00a0 One was a psychiatrist who made $250,000 a year and the other was a radiology MRI expert who made $400,000 a year and this is back in the \u201890s.\u00a0 But my older brother died at the age of 45 and my younger brother–I was close to my younger brother–passed away at the age of 52.\u00a0 So I ended up getting two thirds of my parent\u2019s estate and one third went to my younger brother\u2019s two children.\u00a0 \u00a0They didn’t want to manage property so we took it and gave the cash to the kids.<\/p>\n
My older brother Steve was distant, probably because he was four years older and he was gay.\u00a0 We knew he was gay but it was still a very unspoken thing.\u00a0 When my mom was dying, she would say over and over to me, \u201cDid you know your brother was gay?\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cMom, didn\u2019t you notice that he would bring his boyfriends at Christmas and Thanksgiving?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cOh, I thought that was his roommate.\u201d\u00a0 My dad particularly had a hard time accepting him being gay.<\/p>\n
He had a very successful life.\u00a0 Everywhere he went he was the tops.\u00a0 He was Phi Beta Kappa, Golden Bear.\u00a0 Everywhere I went the teachers would say to me, \u201cOh, you\u2019re Steve Yarnell\u2019s son.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cOh wait, no, that\u2019s not me you\u2019re thinking of.\u201d\u00a0 And my younger brother went to Stanford, got a PhD in organic chemistry and then went to medical school.\u00a0 He was pretty smart too.<\/p>\n
My older brother died of AIDS.\u00a0 He was only 45 at the time.\u00a0 He had a beautiful house in Bernal Heights.\u00a0 I tell people he was like Herbert Philbrick, that TV show \u201cI Led Three Lives.\u201d\u00a0 (editor: Philbrick was recruited by the FBI in the 1940s to infiltrate the Communist Party.<\/em>)\u00a0 He had his family of origin life, he had his East Bay life in San Leandro where he worked as a psychiatrist and he had his San Francisco gay life.<\/p>\n One time when we were playing chess he said to me, \u201cThe best defense is a good offense.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s how he was as a person.\u00a0 He chose to be on the offense about being gay, about a lot of things.\u00a0 That made him a hard person to be around.<\/p>\n My younger brother Tom was very much like my dad, an extremely hard worker.\u00a0 He would just plug away and plug away.\u00a0 He did the same experiment once a week for five years at Stanford until he finally got it to work.\u00a0 That was his PhD.<\/p>\n But my mother would meddle in his relationships.\u00a0 Wouldn’t keep her mouth shut.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I mean about talking to a fault.\u00a0 My brother put up with it for years but when he wanted to get a job after Stanford, he chose to move to Kentucky.\u00a0 He met a girl back there and they had two kids.\u00a0 My mother never really approved of Joan so that made it difficult.<\/p>\n Tom was involved in a very contentious divorce with Joan.\u00a0 He was very conservative\u2014a doctor, a good father.\u00a0 I think she just wanted to have some freedom so they argued.\u00a0 My brother was under a lot of stress.\u00a0 He had an read an MRI and hadn’t seen cancer but the woman developed cancer later and wanted to sue him.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very difficult field, literally shades of grey that you\u2019re reading.\u00a0 So there was the lawsuit and the divorce and he was smoking and overweight.\u00a0 He inherited my dad\u2019s bad heart and he had a heart attack in the shower getting ready for work one morning.<\/p>\n Cecelia and I hopped on a plane and went back to Kentucky to sort through his affairs and I remember going to court and the judge said, \u201cAre you and Cecelia willing to resolving his estate?\u201d\u00a0 And we said, \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0 That was the biggest mistake of my life.\u00a0 The attorney for my brother, who was actually a divorce attorney, had volunteered with the estate stuff but she didn\u2019t know what she was doing.\u00a0 She instructed us to pay all the creditors and then pay the taxes.\u00a0 And that\u2019s completely bass ackwards.\u00a0 So she had to pay $12,000 out of her pocket for that mistake.<\/p>\n Cecelia had been doing graphic arts but she had these chronic headaches that people never understood.\u00a0 They thought, \u201cWell, take an aspirin and you\u2019ll be fine.\u201d\u00a0 It was hereditary in her family.\u00a0 When she had a migraine she was down either vomiting or in bed with the curtains closed for a week.\u00a0 She couldn\u2019t hold down a full time job.\u00a0 As a consequence she became a contract worker.\u00a0 She\u2019d work real hard for a week or so for a company that needed extra help and then she\u2019d collapse and have a migraine.<\/p>\n When we moved up here she stopped working altogether.\u00a0 She\u2019s four and a half years older than I am, just turned 78 though she doesn\u2019t show her age.\u00a0 She was never that athletic before but now she\u2019s lost weight and caught up with me and she\u2019s encouraging me to exercise more.\u00a0 I\u2019m really impressed.<\/p>\n Shortly after I quit my teaching job in Santa Rosa, I was playing in a dance band in Petaluma.\u00a0 We played swing music from the 40s on up and we did a lot of gigs so that made it fun.\u00a0 I enjoyed it but the leader was another reflection of my dad.\u00a0 She would mumble a lot and if you even spoke in a talking voice, she would be upset with you.<\/p>\n The other trumpet player, a woman, said, \u201cHey, have you thought about playing in the New Horizons Band?\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know what she was talking about.\u00a0 I went to a practice back when they were on Sonoma Avenue at the Methodist Church in this tiny old room with about twenty-four people in it.\u00a0 The sound was bouncing off the walls and I thought, \u201cOh my God!\u00a0 Pretty awful.\u00a0 This is perfect for me.\u201d<\/p>\n I joined in \u201903, the third year, and I enjoy it more and more all the time.\u00a0 Just great people.\u00a0 Where do you meet this caliber of person?\u00a0 Someone told me that when Syd passed out at a concert they asked, \u201cIs there a doctor in the audience?\u201d\u00a0 Well, three hands went up in the band.\u00a0 (laughs)\u00a0 Don\u2019t you love it?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been playing a lot of golf and riding my bike when the smoke\u2019s not bad (editor: Northern California fires have been raging.<\/em>), taking hikes, being in nature.\u00a0 I\u2019m learning the guitar again, doing a lot of work on YouTube.\u00a0 I\u2019m really enjoying it but with the guitar I always feel like I am a beginner.\u00a0 My brain has been trained to think of one note at a time.<\/p>\n I became a counselor for a while.\u00a0 Counseling was a perfect fit at the time because it taught me that it was more important to listen to people than it is for me to be beating my gums.\u00a0 I thought counseling would be a little bit like teaching because you\u2019re talking to people.\u00a0 Boy, was I wrong.\u00a0 There is teaching involved but listening was a real good thing for me.<\/p>\n But now I\u2019m thinking, \u201cHey, I\u2019m 73.\u00a0 Do I really want to spend all my time and energy thinking about other people\u2019s stuff?\u201d\u00a0 You don\u2019t know how long you have here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dennis Yarnell, Trumpet “Music has always been there.\u00a0 It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-797","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/797\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}