A couple of days ago, while I was driving for my job in Canby, I saw a tractor trailer truck that had the label “Best in class” on it. Naturally, being the sort of person that I am, I wondered how large of a class was and the thought immediately reminded me of one of my own quirky life experiences. The high moment of my career as a violist in high school was as a sophmore when our orchestra took the opportunity to play in the Smoky Mountain Music Festival in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So, we rented a bus and almost the entire orchestra went up to Appalachian Country to play a couple of pieces, including possibly the fastest piece I have ever played in my life, a movement of a Mendehlsson symphony whose last page consisted of nothing but sixteenth note runs (which is pretty ambitions for a viola part) with the tempo notice presto, accellenando al fine (that is to say, it was a piece that began rapidly and then accellerated to the end).

That particular trip to Gatlinburg was the only time so far I have ever been there, and aside from struggling at ice skating and enjoying some snow fighting at the Smoky Mountain National Park (along with seeing some of the most intriguingly designed roads I had seen up to that point in my life), I remember there not being very much to do there. I know that Gatlinburg is a popular site for the Feast of Tabernacles, but I remember being rather bored at that stage of my life, perhaps because my colleagues were too interested in playing cards or engaged in other activities to want to do anything else, and we weren’t allowed to go to Dollywood, which would have added at least one day’s worth of amusement to our trip while we were in Tennessee. As it was, a lot of our time was scheduled in practices, because my effeminate orchestra teacher had chosen ambitious pieces for us to perform for this festival.

I thought at the time that it was rather ironic that Gatlinburg, Tennessee had the honor of hosting a prestigious festival for classical music, but being a child of Appalachia myself with a strong appreciation for high art, I was pleased at the irony, given that I share it myself. When it came time to perform our song late one afternoon, I was a bit surprised to look at the program to see that we were competing in a class of orchestra that only had two orchestras. Out of all of the orchestras that had come to this particular festival/competition, we had aparently (by no skill of my own, certainly) been given a favorable draw. We played well and ended up winning our class, but it seemed to me a bit unusual that we had found such a small niche to fill that did not have a great deal of competiton.

This was not an isolated experience either. That same year I ended up going to Tallahassee, Florida as one of our county’s representatives for the History Day competition for a dramatic monologue. As it happened, two people got to to for that particular category and there were only three of us entered in the category. I had not intentionally chosen the category because it was an unfilled niche, but by nature I had chosen a niche to fill that met my own interests (as I have been a prolific playwright over the course of my dramatic life) and it just so happened that what I wanted to do naturally seemed to be of interest to few other people. So I was best in class, even if it was a very small class, like being the valedictorian of a one-room schoolhouse. Sometimes in life victory and success simply involves finding one’s niche, and realizing that there is a lot of room and space and not a lot of competition there to worry about while one does what one enjoys and does it well. It was the same sort of following my natural inclinations that led me to be a violist in the first place, the only one of my sixth grade school, and it has generally served me well in life.