A Memoir By Debbie Chase

I hoist my drum from its orange and black batik printed case and place it on the moist, humid ground, in the middle of a circle of Cyprus trees.  Like my fabulous shoe collection, my djembe has been gathering dust over the past four months during stay-at-home orders.  No drum circles, dance classes to play for, or buddies hanging in the park drinking Guinness and banging out rhythms together as the sun set.

I missed my cowboy boots and the swagger they gave me when I wore them, and I missed that drum, when my hands bounced off the goat skin, sound echoed out the bottom to fill a room, and the call and response from my drum buddies filled the air.  

So I pulled on my boots and drove to the park.  I look wistfully at the band shell where we all used to play –eight of us trading rhythms and stories, picking our favorite tunes and arguing over which break went with which song.   The djembe does not come with printed sheet music. All the tunes are taught by watching, listening and memorizing.  We needed each other to remember the order of beats, the breaks, and the names and meanings of the ancient songs, which ones were for harvest, celebrations or rites of passage.

But today I play alone. I angle the drum between my legs and hit my palms to the skin.  The sound is eerie, muffled at first, my hands no longer used to the quick snap needed to make a crisp sound.

So much of my community lost.  All the two-dimensional awkwardness, one-at-a-time, bad timing of a zoom conversation.  Without heat or warmth, my own day-to-day energy fades.  Online relationships hardly seem worth preserving.  

I tilt the bass between my legs, angle my hands around the edges of the tightly pulled goat skin head and attempt sound – eight months of inactivity erasing ten years of devoted practice.  Muffled, flat, uninspiring.  Circling me and my lone chair,  the Cyrus trees in their stoic hardness seem to judge my meager notes, a disappointing substitute for my cluster of misfit drum buddies banging out rhythms, arguing about the break, guzzling beer while we fed off each other’s energy and joy.   

But I keep at it.  The flat notes.  Stiff arms.  Crumpled spine bent over the drum.  

People walk the paths in the park– couples with dogs, older people with canes, kids. 

But then a young girl approaches my circle and starts moving her little hips to my beats, and  I remember the point – joy. I uncurl my back from its hunched stance, kick off my boots, bury my toes in the earth, and channel my buddies.    Victor, the respiratory therapist who smoked so much pot that he could never remember the rhythms.  Lisa, whose dreadlocks smelled like the inside of my son’s rabbit cage.  Omari, former marine and ready with a knife if a stranger approached us from behind.  Wheedie, longing for Ghana where his father was born and had returned to die. I miss the sweat of real people in three dimensions, the smells, the raised voices, the bad timing, the smoke. 

People clap.  I have never been an entertainer.  Content to mess around with my buddies but reluctant to take the stage.  But in this park on this day, when the music houses, dance halls, and theaters are shuttered.  When so few planes fly and the sky is still.  When playgrounds lie dormant and laughing children stay home.  I become the sound filling the park, the streets and the sky.  I feel the offering and the receiving, almost like the call and response of my drummer community.  

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Debbie Chase is a writer, restaurant cook, nonprofit strategy consultant, drummer and mother.  Her work has appeared in Jacobin Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, Cincinnati Review, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Discretionary Love, 5 Minutes and Motherwell.  She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.