Last April, I got married to my absolute favorite person in the world, Aaron Harper. As life often does, it got in the way and prevented us from having a proper honeymoon. We’ve been waiting on the right event to roll around for a little while, and it finally fell from Spotify right into our laps. Aaron’s a fan of jazz, with a particular penchant for the trumpet. We recently stumbled across the Whipped Cream and Other Delights album by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and it instantly dominated our airwaves. Connoisseurs of the trumpet, mariachi, jazz, or just anyone who was alive in 1965 may remember Herb and the TJB. They have been topping the charts for decades, and while the Tijuana Brass is made up of some fresher faces, Mr. Alpert himself is still performing at 90 years old.
I’m not sure I’ve ever made a purchase faster. Thank goodness I did, because every single seat in the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts was filled by the time the velvet curtain opened last Friday. The show was incomparable - an absolute celebration of music, art, history, culture, love, and most of all, of a life well lived. We laughed, we cried, we swooned along to “This Guy’s in Love with You.” You could feel the memories in the air, tactile and soft. Not just the memories of the beloved serenader on stage, but of every couple in attendance who had tangoed to “Love Potion #9” or waltzed to “A Taste of Honey.”
There were a million memorable moments from that night, so it’s impossible to say that any one stood out. However, there was something I noticed that has been bouncing around in my mind since then. Between songs, Herb took questions from the audience rather informally …and by that, I mean that he told the audience to holler their questions from their seats. Herb answered most of the questions with stories, and he tells stories the way lots of older folks do - like a country road with winding curves and hidden trails. Certainly not the fastest way to get from point A to B, but a much more scenic route. As he took his trips down memory lane, he casually dropped the names of industry titans like Louis Armstrong, Burt Bacharach, Sergio Mendes, and Jerry Moss. Of all of the compliments Herb paid to them, I got the sense that one mattered more to him than others. Of all their many accolades and accomplishments, the thing that Herb mentioned most was humbleness.
Herb’s broken record about the humility of his heroes called to mind the same qualities in people I admire. My grandmother is a saint of a woman without an ounce of arrogance in her body. We stopped to see her on our way home from the concert, and I was enlisted to help wrap flowers for her friends at church. The grocery store had roses marked down, so she bought a couple of bouquets and we divided them up into little bundles so she could spread a little joy further around.
This brought upon the realization that while arrogance may be the opposite of humility, it is not the enemy. The real enemy of humility is perfection. Those marked down roses were probably not the most perfect flowers any of her friends had ever received, but they were beautiful nonetheless. If pride would have had a say in things, my grandmother would have not bought them, for fear that their blemishes would diminish the blessing.
Herb knows it, Terry Lane knows it, I’m trying to know it, and maybe you could stand to as well. Insisting on perfection only robs us of the beauty of effort and the lessons of failure. Give yourself the grace to try, fail, and try again. Let humility lead you down a less perfect but more beautiful road.
And as we begin a new school year, let’s also try to extend that grace to others. No one is better than anyone else, but we could all stand to be better to each other.
