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By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Aug. 8, 2006 I've been a whistler since earliest childhood, and I must admit I'm pretty good at it. I started as a young child. I was once asked to whistle with a jazz ensemble at Ohio State University, but I was too shy in those days, just a freshman, to get up in front of an audience. But I've continued to whistle for my own enjoyment, especially while driving to work. A few days ago I had a minor allergic reaction to something, perhaps a bit of shrimp in an egg roll at our favorite Chinese restaurant, and my lips were still just the tiniest bit puffy. A few hours earlier, I couldn't bring forth any significant sound at all. One of my favorite tunes came up on the MP3 play list, Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," and I automatically began whistling along with it. The puffiness, however, prevented my usual high notes and rapid arpeggios, and a strange thing happened. Without thinking about it at all, my brain switched whistling styles and dropped an octave and it was a bizarre, out-of-body, mystical experience. It was as if I were hearing somebody else whistle along with Seger. My whistling was on autopilot. I had seen something similar many years before on Hee Haw, one of the old country music television shows. Re-runs are still playing. The guitarist, Roy Clark, was playing a long solo piece in his usual style when, without warning, his A string broke. Without missing a beat, he switched styles subtly and played on without the A string, and I suspect the folks sitting out in the audience hadn't noticed at all. Clark was a virtuoso instrumentalist, playing anything with strings and also trumpet, piano, and others. Years ago another peculiar whistling episode occurred. I was taking down Christmas lights from our neighborhood entrance and whistling and suddenly realized I was whistling a Mexican-sounding melody, a complete piece with verse and chorus, etc., and that it was not a piece I had heard before but one my brain was composing. I can still whistle it. I have never found anyone who recognizes it as a known piece. I must assume that I spontaneously composed it. I’ve never gotten around to writing words for the tune. My whistling experiences suggest to me that somewhere in everybody there must be a musician hiding. I wrote a piece conjecturing about athletic and musical talent on this site long ago, wondering whether everybody had more athletic abilities or musical talent than they realized, and conjecturing that the athletes and musicians are just people who have learned to tap these talents on a regular and sustained basis. I think we have all had periods of varying length when we were “in the zone” at a sport. It’s worth thinking about. In the meantime, I’ll just go whistling my merry way along. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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