Free The Gift of Fire by Dan Caro

I spent hours trying to figure out how I could make music in a way that didn’t require fingers or strong lips. Then he remembered how I used to ask him about the rhythms he’d tap out when we watched television. His eyes kind of lit up as he reminded me of this: “Danny, not only did you always want to know how I made different kinds of rhythms, but you used to bang on the pots and pans whenever you helped unload the dishwasher. Maybe we should get you a snare drum!”
    And that was it.
    T HE NEXT S ATURDAY MORNING , my father and I climbed into the car for what turned out to be one of the most significant days of my life. It was a beautiful fall morning as we pulled out of the driveway and headed downtown.
    Dad pulled up in front of the same pawnshop we’d visited a week or two before when we’d gone shopping for a used trombone for my brother Scott. The store owner recognized us right away and ushered us in, pointing out a few different drum kits after Dad told him why we’d come back. While my father was highly enthusiastic about my taking up an instrument, he was cautious and frugal, too. He wasn’t about to splurge on an entire drum kit, secondhand or not, until he knew if the drums would be a good fit for me and I’d take playing an instrument seriously. That day, he bought me a single snare drum and two drumsticks.
    Dad didn’t have to wait long to discover just how serious I was, though. From the minute he carried the snare to our den and set it up, I spent every spare minute I had banging away on it. I wouldn’t call what I was doing at first making music, but I was making a connection with an instrument that would become part of my soul and express my thoughts and feelings as well as, or better than, words ever could.
    But the very first time I whacked a drumstick across the taut skin of that just-purchased snare drum, I’m sure I looked more like a lumberjack hacking into a giant redwood than a fledgling drummer trying his best to emulate a percussion giant like Buddy Rich, or one of my other musical heroes. The trouble, as you might imagine, was this: I had no fingers or thumb to speak of on my right hand, and the thumb the doctors in Boston had constructed on my left hand had very little strength, certainly not enough to hold on to a drumstick with the necessary grip. Not all drum playing is beat and rhythm; it’s also the technique with which you hold the sticks. I was swinging with all my might, but it didn’t matter.
    Pretty soon I gave up on the idea that I was going to play like a “normal” two-handed drummer—obviously I wasn’t normal. As I’d done when I was learning to button my shirts, use utensils at the dinner table, or shoot hoops on the basketball court, I tossed out the regular playbook everyone else used to get through life and made up my own rules. I vowed that I would master the drums, just as I had mastered tying my shoes. It took me more than seven years before I tied my laces; thankfully, it took me less than seven weeks to figure out a way to play the drums without hands!
    I began with my left hand, which had the reconstructed thumb. Actually, I had no problem gripping a drumstick between my engineered thumb and the remnants of my left hand. But as soon as I hit the drum itself, the stick would tumble out of my hand and go spinning to the ground. At first that was it—one hit, or two at the very most, and the stick was bouncing off the tiled floor.
    Okay, that’s not a problem, I thought. If I can just hold on to the stick and make at least one complete swing, then all I have to do is practice. Sooner or later, I’ll build up enough strength in my thumb to complete two full swings. And if I can do two swings, it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be slamming that stick against the drumhead 2,000 times in a row!
    The big issue for me was what to do with my right hand. No matter how many hours of physiotherapy I put in or how much I exercised it, there was basically