The Wheels On The Bus

"The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town." Well, the song is a lot longer than that and, really, a lot more interesting even at my age. How I missed it in the nuns' school is beyond me, but maybe it was because I was in the rhythm band in, I think, second grade, to the great amusement of Sister Mary Something. I could never hold on to the cymbals (the straps were too big for my hands), so I was relegated to the sticks.

When I see the percussion act called “Blue Man Group,” I sit transfixed with envy. It’s my second-grade rhythm band on caffeine and steroids; it’s my imagination on meth; it’s heaven with sticks. Funny thing is, they are quite normal in real life; that’s the difference between them and me.

The wheels on the bus go round and round; the horn on the bus goes “beep beep beep.” The drummer on the bus goes “bingetty bonk bink bink bong bong.” The people on the bus go “shush shush shush.” The drummer on the bus goes, “you ain’t got rhythm.”

The nuns in heaven go, “You were cute in second grade; you aren’t cute now.”

Eventually, I became a self-taught pianist and, even later, took trumpet lessons. The experimentation was still there, as I tried playing the trumpet with a trombone mouthpiece to see what areas of the musical scale we (the trumpet and I) could explore.

My thanks to www.kididdles.com/lyrics/