The morning I met Aria, I saw the sunrise. I saw the darkness crack and scatter before the pink, then orange, then scarlet glow of the morning. I looked through the back window of the car speeding west down I-40 and watched an everyday miracle play out. I leaned forward in my seat, nervous, exited. I wondered if two and a half years of struggle were about to culminate in the granting of my greatest wish, the achievement of a dream for which so many of my colleagues were too poor to ever hope. We were rocketing towards something that might be a false chance, a red herring, a dead end. However, possibility glitters like metal in the sun. I sat there gnawing a fried chicken biscuit from a drive through window wondering if I was riding towards something like destiny. It was the second day of a summer gathering of tuba players, and I was on my way to meet an instrument I might buy.
Half way through the seventh grade, I was a shy, nervous, nerdy girl with no real passion or direction. A band director told me to go into a practice room and try my hand at the tuba. My life had shifted on its axis by the end of the period. I still wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do with myself, but I knew that whatever it was, it would involve the instrument. I went home and told my parents to start saving for a very expensive horn. While my parents had found ways to put money away, I grew taller, more assertive, more confident. I learned fast, working with all the fanaticism of a convert. By the summer before tenth grade, it was accepted that I would be the highest-ranking tuba player in the school from the coming August on to graduation. As we pulled into the UNCG campus, I reflected on the chance that I might become the first tuba-owning student in the history of my dirt poor school before sundown.
We met the owner of the instrument. My thoughts were cloudy, murky with the early hour. I knew that I could easily end up working with this tuba for the rest of my life. I wondered whether the alchemy of hope and fear churning in my guts was what a person from a culture of arranged marriage feels on the way to meet a likely spouse. A graduate student at the music school led us to a practice room. I had always played American tubas, and this was a German. The proportions, the angle of the bell, the rotary valves like those of a “French” horn were foreign. It looked expensive, intimidating. The thick brass was heavier in my hands than anything else I had played. The bore of the bell and pipes was wide. It took me a few tries to get that colossus to sound. It was only when I began to play that we really met, that I came to understand the power and beauty of this creature of brass and fire.
I saw that she was the pale, faint hue of an alloy between yellow and white gold. The dent guards and the long keys of the valves were silver. She was fire. She was sunlight on Lake Michigan. She was nothing like the plodding, broken down tubas I played at school. This one had a life of her own, or wanted one. I found a yearning cast in brass, a desire to escape. When I later found her only owners had been two old men, I knew why. She seemed to cry out for something more than another twenty years of community band concerts in the park. This was a tuba I could bring back to my school. I told her owner she was satisfactory, that I would speak with my parents. I told my mother I was in love. That evening, we all went out to dinner. My mother gave the old tuba player $3200 in hundred dollar bills.
My parents could no longer understand the daughter whom an urban public school had transformed into a stranger. I performed in a tuxedo and did the work of a man. I fell in love with the son of a repairman who worked for the state and learned to swear. I was a well-respected member of a less than respectable community. All they knew was that the stranger they loved wanted a tuba more than anything else. They found a way to give me one. They bought me an instrument, a companion, a way to keep playing after graduation. It was all they could give a person they no longer knew. I have never seen a more perfect expression of their love.
Aria and I have weathered some storms together these last two years. I kept her safe through severe weather, the occasional outright attack, and a move. Most days, I love her more than anything but God himself. Some mornings, I see the first rays of the sun come through the window and reflect on polished metal. There, before me is the vision of that first morning. Light sparkling on my tuba's contours and dancing on every edge is a lesson in gratitude, in love that outlasts and outlives. That, in my mind, is the image of blessing, of God's grace, of the love of a parent for an unrepentant prodigal child.

I was in my case that morning, locked away in the dark. I had been there a long time. I belonged to an old man. He'd take up with some cute little tuba and left me locked up in that black, plastic shell. He was seventy two, and his lungs weren't what they used to be. The situation wasn't any more his fault than it was mine. It was his nature to get older and mine to need a ton of air. After all, I'm from Germany. Over there, they make us like Hummers. As hard as he tried, Roger just couldn't fill the tank anymore. It got to where I hardly ever saw the sun. After a while, I heard him talk about how I was going to be sold. When he loaded me into his van, didn't know where we were going, but I did know why.
When there was light again, light for the first time in who knows how many weeks, I saw a girl. This was no grandma. She looked like she was about my age. She was an icy blond who had made it to midsummer without getting a tan. I wondered if she would melt if she went out in the sun. Her hands, though, were another story. They belonged to a tuba player. For the first time in so long, I felt myself heating up, absorbing the warmth of a living body. My owner handed her a silver mouthpiece. I lived again, borrowing a pulse and breath from a real organism, a person with a beating heart. That something extra, the music, the way the notes become more than the sum of their parts, was coming out of a human mind and soul.
I saw her. I saw into her. I knew she had been the runt of the litter, the last tuba player made in her beginning band and the only girl. She was also the only one of the five still playing. She clawed her way through the ranks, and now she was about five weeks from taking over the highest position in tuba playing at her school. And the school! Kids planning on sending an applications to Yale ate lunch with hippies and Bloods from East Durham. It was always one desperate quick fix from falling down. This wasn't some old guy who was content to sit in his community band chair until they stuck him in the nursing home. There was fire here, strength and hunger. She wanted to be awesome someday. She wouldn't settle for less. She was going to be one of those people who can take a tuba in their hands and wield it like a force of nature. I was the first nice horn she'd ever been allowed to touch. She was almost intimidated enough to walk away, but I convinced her to stick around. This was my chance to see a bit more of the world, to have some adventures. Besides, as nice as my first two masters were, I'd never fallen head over heels for anyone before. Two years later, we're still together.
Larkin was everything she promised. Besides me, she had seven school tubas and a black sousaphone to her name. She was a crazy workaholic who sometimes went to dinner in full regalia, full freaking penguin suit, before a show. She beat dents out of tubas with machinist's hammers and made a strap out of an old leather coat. There were times she was either working or asleep, but she did find a few days now and then to take me to the mountains. Since she bought me, I've gotten to see all kinds of strange places. We do alright together. We're still figuring things out, still doing our best, still in love.