In the third grade my teacher tried to give a formal training in the harmonica. This just didn't work for me. It was just business-as- usual schooling.
But when I was drumming and playing native flute at the missile base, before going to Mexico, Nancia, a wonderful singer, musician, and author, gifted me with a thirty-year-old, American Ace Harmonica, made in China.
I totally engaged Central America with it. I had a wonderful time engaging the world musically. It was the first time I had done this.
But while I was in Miami, (on the Pirate/Garifuna Coast of Honduras), my harp began to physically deteriorate. While I was serenading a tropical sunset I heard something snap. I had lost much of my minor key, the inhalation notes. But I played around it, an interesting musical exercise.
On my last night in Miami I met these three guys from Boulder, Colorado who were 'One World Running', a non-profit group that distributed running shoes to children all over Central America. The next day, my last day in Miami, they were going to organize foot races and the distribution of really nice running shoes. They asked if I wanted to help them.
It was a great party, a great thing for the children, a great way of leaving this place which I had musically engaged, where I had gotten to know a lot of people. Upon request I broke out my harmonica. When children asked to play on my harmonica I let them.
I handed my harmonica to a Garifuna child no older than four. The child was so delighted with that harmonica, took to it immediately. I turned away to sign up other kids for the races. When I turned around to see where my harmonica had gone to, I saw the child walking beneath this gazebo-type building - to the other side of the throng seeking good, running shoes.
I knew there was no malice in the child who had taken my instrument. But for a moment I couldn't help thinking - you little, yellow-shit. But I caught myself, saw how ludicrous it was to be entangled in the physicality of a broken, made in China harmonica.
I wished the child and his new broken, made in China harmonica well.
But I missed my harmonica as I crossed Guatamala and returned to the Campamento Tucan Verde Ecologico, Ishmael's place in the Lacondon Jungle, in Chiapas, Mexico. And yet I knew I was going to the right place, to be with the right people, to be in the circumstances in which I knew I would get a new harmonica.
When I went to visit with the Shaman Cayyum, Cayyum was not home but there were three artisanos from the Yucatan there. They needed some pesos to get back to the Yucatan. One of them wanted to sell a M. Hohner, hecho in Germany, Golden Melody Harmonica, that was his grandfather's, but he had never taken to it.
I gave him a thirty peso tube of motor. I gave him about seventy pesos in change - all I had.
It was a deal.
It's a very different instrument. There was a whole new learning curve. But it is the right instrument for the song I am arriving in as I arrive in my native land.
I look forward to receiving harps in other keys.