Pans & Pans to Clean.

Date for Entry: (Saturday 29th August, 2015)

Actual Date of Online Entry: (Tuesday 6th July, 2021)

Dear Diary,

Today was the Youth group meeting in the church. We had to practice for service tomorrow and also it was going to be repeated in Kelly. I was most excited because I had made some plans to clean all of the pans in the church by myself. For this meeting, I probably went a little crazy because I had packed one of my cloth bags with the musical flashcards, my youth group notebook with the prayer I wrote in less than a minute, a bowl and a blue J cloth. 

The sad thing was that Wednesday when I was labelling the pans, I heard from one of my friends in the group that the church had given away two of the tenor pans. Now, this part got me upset and worried because this pan gives the melody. But then I continued to quote the labelled notes in a dark red marker. The only thing was that I didn’t have my tablet to see the labelling of the pans on an app that I had downloaded. So, I took my tenor stick and compared the sounds to the others pans. This helped me a lot because I was not familiar with any of those in the back. For the six basses in the back, I couldn’t touch it because it was painted in black and the writing wouldn’t have shown up. Few backs and forth trips to the piano was helpful.

    On my procedure of cleaning a pan, which I had no idea of doing, I had to get my bottle of rubbing alcohol at home. Then I realised that I had to get the pan sticks I brought for the group and also a copy of the national anthem. Some of them said they could try but then I had a feeling that they would have just left it. So then I had to run home and get that to come back from the pool as fast as possible. But in any case, I printed out a full score of the National Anthem and it was in four pages. I thought it was going to be three pages. But I was still glad because it was something that I had arranged for a whole Steelband without much teaching and it sounded like it might have worked from the computer's playback.

    By seven o'clock, I was all done with the Bass pan with my shoulders hurting because I had to lift up all of those six heavy pans by myself and re-arrange them. So, each pan was lifted twice. How painful. The pans looked happy and presentable now. I took my time rubbing the solution I mixed with the rubbing alcohol and water all on the body of the pan and at the end. By by the time I was done and ready to snap a picture, they were all ready to lock up the church and go home.

    I do not have any pictures of this set of work to which I had done and put care in but they do look good. If time was there I would have gotten to take the pans down from the racks and clean out the inside lower bottom sides of them. Hopefully, tomorrow will go well and I will get to play the National Anthem for the Service.

Daryl Zion M. Ali