Packages in the mail...

I still like to get packages in the mail, have since I was a kid.

And an expected package arrived today, a mandolin, not the fanciest, but a nice one and good for beginners with a place in my office already set up for it and a case arriving tomorrow.

But it was broken, a piece of the bridge had come loose in transit and left a half dollar size tear in the sunburst finish marring it beyond repair. The folks at the store tell me they can send one out as soon as the other comes back, by ground, to Kansas City. It looks like the middle of next week anyway. I'm disappointed.

It's not the damage, those things happen, but the loss of time that matters. The mandolin was to be a new adventure, a portable instrument with a lonely soul that I could take on my travels. I had ideas about what we could do together and where we could go and plans to sit on the bluffs outside Taylors Falls and watch the water and play whatever I could just for the trees.

Music has been a kind of sanity for me these past months. I play it constantly on XM while I drive and more often than not I can be found upstairs late at night practicing this instrument or that, my own songs mostly, with no one to listen except the open window. When my prayers go dry the music becomes my prayer. It's a passion with me and had it not been unthinkable when I was younger I could have seen myself trying to make a life of it.

Regardless the mandolin will have to wait. I'll get the case Fed Ex tomorrow and perhaps I'll leave it open and waiting, a kind of symbolic thing I suppose, for the time when the mandolin and the music arrive to fill it. And that's okay because I've already been playing it in my heart.