I’m sorry. Really sorry.

I’m not starting a feral cat fighting ring, nor a halfway house for drug-addled Muppets.

It’s a saxophone. And you can blame my mother-in-law.*

One night at dinner, I mentioned that I’d always wanted to learn the saxophone. It was one tiny piece of conversation over a long dinner with six people, many topics, plus wine and dessert. I’d forgotten we’d even talked about it, until she sent a card that said “The saxophone is on its way.”

And then this happened:

There’s a saxophone in there — from another state and another era.

Which lead to this:

Me, pretending to know what I’m doing. I did make noise. Keyword, “noise.”

Anne sent me the saxophone both she and Derek used when learning music, which led a friend to dub it “the ancestral saxophone.” When I took it to get checked out and cleaned up, the repair guy said it had keys he’d never seen before. He looked up the serial number in his sax bible and chuckled. “I knew it was old, but I didn’t think it was 99 years old! Made in 1916.” Ancestral, indeed.

“Learn the saxophone” has been on my life list since high school, but in the “someday” column, butting up against such barriers as being unable to read music, not owning a saxophone, and living in a small apartment with shared walls.

I am officially out of excuses. I no longer share a wall, and soon we won’t have neighbors near enough to bother. But in the meantime, dear neighbors, I apologize. On the bright side, you’ll be happy to see us leave.

* Don’t really blame her. She’s great, and she’s helping to make a dream come true.