One man's trash...

 Frank found that learning became harder the more he aged. It never used to be so challenging to wrap his head around new things. When did he get so old?

 He’d been quite content in his first-floor flat, with its outdated furniture and deliberately sparse memories featured on the walls and mantelpiece (for ease of cleaning, he assured his few visitors). It was a non-intimate space in every sense, but that was how he liked it. Since Liddy had passed, he’d settled into this new life for one. It certainly meant fewer arguments over what news broadcast to watch after dinner or which movie to see at the weekends. Not to mention, lower heating costs (she always needed the thermostat high) and less toilet paper needed for the split bathroom/toilet partition (crucial in these uncertain times). But—when he occasionally allowed himself to remember—sometimes the quiet of the apartment got too much for him and he was lonely.

One afternoon, while walking along his street—deserted, as usual—he had come across a large black instrument case amongst a pile of kerbside clutter; the discarded evidence of someone’s recent spring cleaning. He was surprised to see something of such value among the junk— that was, if the instrument was still inside and intact.

The loneliness of the case, in a place it didn’t belong, resonated with him. Frank hesitated and looked up and down the street, as though expecting someone more worthy to walk up and stake their claim on it, but there was no one else. He bent down and picked up the case by its handle. It was heavy; the instrument was still inside. He felt a pang of guilt, undeserving of this gift. Now eager to get going, lest it was all a misunderstanding and actually the instrument had been left out by accident, he kept the case closed and, before he could think too much more on it, quickly walked home, a new spring in his step.

Once he’d set the kettle on the stove, Frank returned to the living area where he’d left the case on the coffee table. With a reverence for this unexpected shift in his usual routine, he unclasped the case and opened its lid, revealing the instrument inside: it was a French horn. He slowly lifted it out of the felt lining, testing its weight in his hands and looking at its curves in wonderment. The instrument had obviously been used, with scratches and fingerprints covering its dulled brass surface, and a chip on the edge of the bell where someone had mishandled or dropped it. But it was beautiful; all it needed was some TLC.

He began researching what he needed to clean and care for the instrument, and set about making it a welcome addition to his home.

Frank quickly found it was nice caring for something again; giving it hours of his attention, finding pride when it shone brightly as though it were new again.

It took him a while to summon the courage to play the horn. Maybe he was worried that after everything, he might not actually like the sound it made. Or, maybe it was his fear that in never having learned an instrument before, he wouldn’t know where to start.

But when he puffed up his cheeks and set his lips upon the mouthpiece, the noise that he produced shocked him, both for its rude interruption of the room’s silence—the note stalled as he gasped in surprise, pulling his face away—and the euphoria at what he could so abruptly create from nothing but air. He took a deep breath and tried again, producing a single extended note that rang in his ears and made his mind swim between undulating layers of sound.

Playing the horn took over all his senses, and removed any inconsequential worry from his mind as he focused on improving his sound and becoming one with the instrument as he learned how to hold its unfamiliar, bulky form.

Frank could draw out longer, lingering, sounds and shorter, put-put-put, sounds. He could make a note louder and then softer within the same breath.

When he played too long, sometimes he found his brow getting dewy and his brain oddly faint from the effort. But despite the energy it took, the sound replaced it in him with a new and vibrant energy that made him want to keep trying, to keep improving.

Eventually, he started experimenting with the keys, creating new sounds entirely, and very quickly he was stringing together simple melodies. Dum dum daah. Dum dah di-doo-dah.

It seemed limitless, the amount of joy this instrument could bring him. Every day playing was one of discovery. Though sometimes his resolve wavered; the more he got to know the horn, the more its quirks tested his patience. It reminded him of someone.

Frank went to the library, took out a book on music, and read about learning the horn. It required discipline and patience. It required time and practice, and wasn’t for the feeble. Yes, he was learning this on his own. But the challenge of it was still giving him satisfaction and he could tell the music was improving. To his ear, he and the horn, together, were starting to create... music.

He kept practicing. Thanks to a learner’s manual, he now knew how to perform a minor scale, an arpeggio, a trill...

Until one day, there was a loud knock on his apartment door. It was Mrs. C from the apartment next door.

“Frank!” she started, sternly, once he had opened the door. Frank noticed her usually neat hair was falling out of its elegant knot in grey wisps.

“There’s only so much of this I can handle,” she said. “Do you realise how much noise you are making? These walls are not as thick as I would like and I can tolerate quite a bit, but please, have some respect!” Without waiting for his response, she turned on her heel and strode back to her apartment, the tips of her ears quite pink.

Frank didn’t like to think of what he was doing as noise—it was music—but he also didn’t want to annoy Mrs. C any more than he apparently already had.

So, the next day, Frank decided to leave the confines of the flat and took his new brass companion with him.

Stepping out into the sunshine, he could now appreciate the music all around him—in the birdsong floating around from sources hidden in the trees, the rhythmic crunch of his footsteps underfoot as he walked. Even in the guttural rippling of a far-off airplane slicing through the sky.

He took a lap around a nearby park, and then sat down on a bench, setting the French horn beside him. It gleamed in the sunlight and he sat staring at it proudly, allowing himself a rare smile.

A middle-aged woman jogged past, giving him a strange look.

A few minutes later, a young teenage couple walking a dog came along the footpath. As they approached, the mutt started growling and hunching its back, staring at the instrument. The boy struggled to keep the mutt from springing from its lead and dragged it past Frank, before throwing an odd look over his shoulder, his girlfriend also looking back, stifling giggles and pointing.

Frank thought he’d take the opportunity to practice his new instrument in a more secluded area of the park. He found his way to a fenced-in corner, out of sight of the footpath, and raised the horn to his lips.

“You can’t do that here,” called a voice from nearby.

Frank looked up and saw a man staring at him from a neighbouring property, on the other side of the park fence. He was standing on an outdoor patio, with his hands on his hips, apparently waiting for Frank to respond.

“I can’t practice at home,” Frank called back.

“Well, you can’t practice here either,” the man retorted, getting angry. “Move along now.”

Frank couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t these people see how beautiful this instrument was? This man hadn’t even heard it play yet.

Frank slowly made his way back to the apartment, some of the colour from the air having dulled with the waning sunlight.

Once he got home, quite bewildered as to what to do next, Frank got to thinking about Liddy. For the first time since her passing, he started to appreciate how she, previously, had filled those holes in his life that had been sparked back to life by the French horn recently.

Frank had sacrificed a lot for Liddy, but now it was easier for him to focus more on how much she’d given him in return. And to appreciate, with renewed understanding, the prejudice she’d dealt with daily.

She used to get upset when people stared at her; Frank always told her not to worry, as they didn’t understand, they didn’t know the real her. But that hadn’t stopped them staring, or laughing, or becoming angry.

When she got too cold, or something frightened her, or plans had to be rearranged due to some unexpected change, she’d made a fuss, often quite loudly. Their previous landlords—while having a seemingly limitless ability to pump out blueberry pies and flans by way of seeming neighbourly—were  not the most patient folk, and more than once they had berated Liddy so harshly through the closed front door that she had spent days hiding in her room.

Distracted by a shame of having to live with his sister and contain her in situations like this—as well as the guilt that he was useless at it—Frank had said nothing to defend Liddy on these occasions. His failure to stand up for his sister, who could not control her disease, made him ashamed only after the fact, but then he’d remind himself that he never signed up for any of this, that she was keeping him from starting a family of his own, from any social life or romantic attachment, and the resentment quickly worked to override any sympathy for her.

But Liddy had no one else. So Frank’s bachelorhood had drawn on and on, until Liddy was gone and he no longer wished for an alternate life and was too old to consider changing his ways anyway bah humbug.

That was until the French horn from the trash heap. Now, as he slowly recognised, he was putting all the effort and care into this instrument that he wish he had with Liddy as a younger man. He would not be ashamed of this beautiful thing that had fallen into his life. He would not be made to feel it was wrong to love caring for something again, especially when it brought him joy and couldn’t disappoint him by holding his guilt of a life unlived against him, like he himself had for too long.

The others were blind, and they were too busy or distracted to understand the beauty of what he cherished. But Frank didn’t care, he had a new centre to his world and he would treasure it.