I Should Have Played the Flute

There's no escaping the fact: the bass is going to take up half the car. Bass players have, of course, long suffered from their choice of instruments. Okay, so the thing is six feet long and three feet wide. For decades, bass players have had to buy a second seat on airplanes, just for the instrument. But think about it for a moment: when an advertiser wants to make music look sexy, what's the first thing they do? They show an upright bass.

One good thing about the bass taking up so much room is it cuts down on what else I can take. When you have to strip your life down to the bare essentials, what do you need?

Well, the electric bass, too, of course. Both computers and printers. The scanner. A large box of notebooks. Maybe, living in a town with a tiny, tiny library, I really will get around to finishing St. Augustine's City of God. I can't tell you how many trips I've taken that on, and I don't think I've ever made it past page 80.

There's that wonderful old song with the line "going where the weather suits my clothes," and what I realize is that, after much, much too long in Arizona, I really don't have the clothes for an Alaska winter.

I have bought a huge, thick pair of gloves that will probably make everybody up there laugh at me. So what. I have to protect my hands so I can keep playing the bass.