The Sunday Musician

I have trouble understanding instructions. I can play the piano, type 40 words a minute, hook up a sound system, run a computer, program a synthesizer, and read a novel in two sittings (long sittings, but I have a high tolerance for sitting), yet I have trouble with basic instructions. It happens when I’m under pressure.

Given enough time I can usually figure things out, but there’s never enough time. I signed my first driver’s license in the wrong spot and had to sign it again in the right spot – all because the woman at the counter was in a hurry. They left it that way, and for four years I had the only license in Michigan with two signatures.

I feel so alone in this. Everyone around me seems to so easily handle it all. They breezily fill in loan applications and build model cars while simultaneously drinking coffee and carrying on conversations. Plastic models are an absolute nightmare for me. The so-called ‘exploded drawings’ seem to be describing nothing even remotely resembling a ‘wheel assembly’, and I can never find any parts in the box that coincide with those in the drawing. This problem is never more obvious than in group situations.

About eight years ago the staff at the Big Church went to a day-long Franklin Planner Seminar. We sat at long tables, and were issued new planners, which came in boxes, and were not yet assembled. Before we could talk about the benefits of the Franklin Planner, we had to assemble it. The instructor led us through step by step, but she might as well have been speaking Cantonese and leading us through the building of a nuclear device. If you are not instruction-impaired, let me put you on the inside of this.

The instructor asks us to remove the shrink-wrapped bundle of pages from our boxes and hold it up. I look, and I see at least 7 shrink-wrapped bundles of pages. Which one is the right one? I don’t know, so I look around – everyone is already holding theirs up. How did they know which one to pick? Ah, I see – we’re putting the calendar pages in first, and anyone with the common sense that God gave a shovel would have known that intuitively. I look again in my box, but I don’t see that bundle. Surely my box can’t be the only one without that bundle – I must just be missing it. However, no amount of pawing loudly through the box produces any bundle that looks right.

By now everyone is inserting their pages into their ring-binders, and I’m behind. So I dump everything out onto the table. “Easier this way,” I whisper knowingly to the stranger seated next to me, who is already somehow telepathically three steps ahead of the instructor. Ooh, there’s the bundle! – but now I can’t get the shrink-wrapping off. I finally tear it open with my pen, but manage in the struggle to draw a big line down the first page. “This is just a cover page anyway,” I again whisper, “Besides – I never schedule anything for the first day of the month”. But I don’t believe it myself, and I feel the first trickle of sweat down my collar.

Next the instructor asks us to quickly fill in our name and address on the front sheet. I need not tell you at this point that I have no front sheet, nor anything remotely resembling a front sheet. (I find later that I threw it out with the shrink-wrapping, but it’s better at this point anyway – there’s no way I could possibly get my name or any other information onto the proper line under the pressure of the situation.)

Sensing my angst, a certain member of the staff, full of Christian love and compassion, catches my eye and smirks. A while back I mistakenly confided to him that I am instructionally challenged, and he’s watching my pain with such glee that he's practically speaking in tongues as I fumble with the ring binder – which, mysteriously, will not open. “I know this is hard for you”, he intones with mock sympathy, snorting coffee out his nose.

Everything gets a little fuzzy, my vision narrows, and suddenly NOTHING from my box looks ANYTHING like the things the instructor is describing. People are whistling happy little self-satisfied tunes and putting their binders together handily, and one guy is already done and going for a coffee refill. I’m supposed to be finding and installing some pages with ‘chartreuse tabs’ on the edge and I don’t know what color chartreuse is and I’m suddenly 6 years old and misunderstanding Miss Hoeksema’s instructions for the art project. I now see that the Day-Planner instructor slightly resembles Miss Hoeksema, and I wonder what her maiden name is. My thumb is inexplicably bleeding, and I’m dangerously close to the worst possible outcome of this – drawing the instructors’ attention.

Darkness mercifully closes in as I force open the ring binder and begin jamming the packets in untouched, plunging the rings through the shrink-wrapping.

The next thing I remember is sitting in a booth at IHOP, staring at a 14-page breakfast menu. I close the menu and defiantly order ‘some pancakes’.