10% Fiction

By the time you’re eighty years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it. – George Burns.

My girl walks proudly on to the stage clutching her trumpet. She beams when she sees me in the audience and does one of those little low wagging of her fingers, a wave just for me. She takes her position up the back, which is disappointing because it’s difficult to see her; she’s a shorty … just like her mum. But I’ll know I’ll hear her—loud and clear. And I know what she is going to play, because I’ve heard her toot it over and over the past few weeks in preparation for the recital.

“Nonno says practice makes perfect,” my girl tells her dad and I one evening after we’d commented about a particularly long and particularly loud session of tooting. As she walks from the room her ponytail swishes, flicking up at us.

We joke about it later, when she is in bed, “Of course he wouldn’t mind all that tooting …” I say. I don’t need to continue, my husband is already laughing, knowing full well how deaf his father has become in recent years.
Continue Reading »