In the time before there were times, there lived a wandering minstrel who went from town to town introducing people to what he called songs, because nobody knew what a minstrel was, and nobody knew what a song was.
“A song tells a story with music,” he would say. In some of the saddest towns, people would ask, “What’s a story?” or sadder still, “What is music?”
He would sigh and say, “Have you ever listened to birds?” and then he would imitate a bird calling from tree to tree. “The birds sing songs to talk to one another. Who knows what they might be saying to one another?” Then he would sing with a simple melody,
“Hello, everyone, I am happy to be
Singing a song in this lovely old tree.”
People would “oooh” and perhaps “aaah,” and he would smile and say, “That is music.”
And then he would play his lute — for the lute is the oldest of minstrel’s tools going back even to that time before times were times — and in this way stories and melodies were spread across the land.
Occasionally a young man or woman would come up to the minstrel and say, “I would love to do what you do,” and so he would bring out another lute to give to the youth and teach them what he knew. In this way more minstrels began to wander the hills and vales.
By the time we recognized times for what they are, singers and stories and songs and minstrels were, if not commonplace, at least not unusual or new. Anytime a minstrel met another minstrel, they would smile and break out in song, trading stories and making friends, because music makes friends by its very nature.
That is why sourpusses immediately cry, “Turn off that damnable music!” after the first few moments, because they know that while the music is playing sour notes are banished, and sourpusses thrive either when all the notes are sour or when there is no music at all.
One day the minstrel wandered into a town where lived the sourest sourpuss of them all. This was a man who had never smiled and, in fact, did not even know what a smile was. If you smiled at this man, he would look at you with suspicious eyes and ask, “What is wrong with you that you grimace so?”
The minstrel heard of this man and decided to teach him to smile. He stood in front of the man’s house and sang,
“Here I am with a song for you.
Listen to this and don’t be blue.”
As you might suspect, the sourpuss was extremely suspicious of this stranger. But as one song followed the next, the sourpuss began to soften until, after one especially sad and beautiful song, he began to cry and even said, “Why have I been such a sourpuss? Who knew such beautiful sounds could be created by miserable humans, even one such as I?”
“I knew,” said the minstrel, and for the first time in his life, the sourpuss smiled. In fact, he didn’t just smile, he grinned the biggest grin that anyone in that town had ever seen, and then he actually began to sing himself.
And thus the sourpuss was on his way to becoming the most amazing and beloved minstrel of them all, even though he could not help but sometimes sing sour notes. That was how the world learned that music is for everyone and that everyone can sing a beautiful song if only they are willing to try.
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If you enjoyed this little bit of fluff, you might enjoy 96 more tiny tales in The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue, a collection of flash fiction by your humble host.
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Here is episode 11 of the “See the World! Podcast,” daily readings from my forthcoming book See the World! It’s scheduled for release June 10 and available for pre-order by clicking the book’s title.
