Date for Entry: (Friday 17th December, 2010)
Dear
Diary,
Today Mommy and I travelled down to Mount Hope to the Sewing
Room. She showed me a brochure about pans for sale. She told me that she knew
someone who was going to sell us a steelpan. I at first, knew that I was going to
get my very first pan but not much feeling was coming out that very moment.
There were still questions hiding inside of me.
We travelled in a Maxi Taxi on the Main Road to Laventille,
opposite the Angostura Factory. There was Factory looking place on that side of the road called Panland. How
exciting! There was a nice lady in the office who sold the pan to us.
She took me to a side of the 'store' and showed me all the pans with a variety of colours. I
chose a Candy Blue one and made sure that it was a Low C Tenor Pan.
Just looking at the instrument was so beautiful. The inside was written so lovely with
a greyish type of paint and labelled so appropriately. Mommy also bought me a stand and a pan book for it.
They gave us a pair of sticks free for purchasing the pan and a discount on the
pan because it was made incomplete somehow but the pitches sounded right after trying it out.
I could remember that mommy brought a square-shaped white
piece of cloth from the Sewing Room. She was going to give the lady it and come
back for the pan on another day. But I knew in my mind that if I had let mom
give the lady the piece of cloth, there must have been some form of difficulty
in the future with getting the pan home.
When we got back, mom put me outside and she made me play for some of the people she knew, near the nice guard lady outside of the Emergency doors. I had to play “Little Drummer Boy” in F Major what I learned from school.
(Update)
I can recall that during the day at the point of purchase that their Linx machine was down. Another salesperson took us over to Angostura to do the purchase but they too had similar issues. We had to take a Maxi trip somewhere in the middle of our journey to get to the bank but one of them had a problem. It was either hold up or some issue with the teller machine.
We got through some other way and eventually in the evening around three in the evening, we were in a Maxi Taxi coming back up to Mount hope. Not sure if it was the same main road or bus route. I felt shy when people in the Maxi saw us with the naked tenor pan wrapped up in the white fluffy cloth. The pan stand was tied up in a black garbage bag in three separate parts.
Links:
Daryl Zion M. Ali
