Randa and I found our way to our seats for the symphony performance about twenty minutes before start time on Saturday evening. Her brother, Kevin, and one of his grandkids joined us. While Kevin and Randa talked, I struck up a conversation with the young guy sitting to my right. He is a percussionist majoring in music at Missouri Western, which is in Saint Joseph, as is the symphony. Turns out that the conductor is also one of Nick’s music instructors at the college. Nick, and, I assume, the rest of his class, had been directed to attend the concert and write a review.

As the symphony began to play its opening number for the season, a Mozart piece, I leaned forward in anticipation. About three minutes in, I felt the slight pressure of Nick’s elbow against my side. I ignored it for a while but then the pressure increased somewhat. “That’s a bit un-neighborly,” I thought, but still avoided moving or anything else. Finally, as the push of his elbow against my side had reached the point of beginning to dislodge me from my seat, I turned to say something to the kid.

He was so asleep that the side of his head was slumped over, touching against his shoulder. I don’t know how his baseball cap stayed on. I half-expected to see a wee dribble of drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. Fortunately, the lights were too low for me to make determination on that point. He barely stirred during the applause as the symphony concluded Mozart. Not even the guest virtuoso violinist playing Beethoven could rouse Nick’s interest. He slept as soundly as an exhausted coal miner on a feather mattress.

Apparently, someone stumbled over the lad during intermission or else spilled a cold drink down his back. When I returned to my seat, young Nick had vacated the premises, not to return. I suppose he had to rush home and start typing up his review of the performance, perhaps beginning with “The soothing strains of Mozart eased through an appreciative and receptive audience…”

I’m sure Nick must have reported to his friends how completely boring it was. A world renown musician and an accomplished symphony performing music of such quality that it remains fascinating two hundred years after its composition was not sufficient to hold any interest for him. Nick was not there for the triple-curtain-call standing ovation at the end of the performance that spoke of how dramatically different the perceptions of others were from his own.

It is often in life that our response to a certain event tells others more about us than about the event. Even if it’s an event that happened nearly two thousand years ago.

H. Arnett

10/3/11