~ Sound the Trumpet ~

My Captain is a horrendous pack rat.  He’s almost as bad as my mother.  I, however, have a low threshold for being surrounded by unusable stuff.  So while I laid around elevating my post-surgery knee yesterday, My Captain took the opportunity to clean out a bunch of accumulated junk…..  All of it his, and very little of it worth keeping:

The ’80’s flowered ties….gone.

Programs from events decades ago….gone.

Batteries that expired in 2005…gone.   But not until after we licked ’em to make sure they were indeed dead.

There were a few nuggets worth keeping, and reasons we were glad we didn’t just throw out the whole Kit and Kaboodle:

Pictures of My Captain and his daughter during Father/Daughter dances for many years in a row.  Pictures where his now textbook aloof teenage daughter was once clinging to his lap in white tights and velvet dresses.  The kinds of pictures that are so beautiful, they squeeze your heart.

And a banged up, old, brass trumpet.

It turns out that My Captain used to have quite “The Chops” when he was younger.  I’ve never heard him play….didn’t even know he had a trumpet in amongst all his copious amounts of stashed stuff.

That is one of the things I love about him….he has so many nooks and crannies to his personality.  There are still sides to him I don’t know; there are still parts of him I haven’t met yet.  This is not a simple man.  He’s not one who is easy to figure out.

And he still surprises me.

He was wondering what he should do with the ol’ trumpet.  I suggested he give it to his son, who used to play it.  But he said, “Nah, he doesn’t want it.”  Then I suggested he donate it to the school, and he said, “Nah, it’s not a good trumpet.  They wouldn’t want it.”  Then I suggested we sell it to an antique store.  He liked that idea.

But this morning it hit me that I want to hang it on our living room wall.  Why?  Because it is a reminder that My Captain is full of surprises.

And depth.

And lots and lots of old junk.