I always wanted to play an instrument, but I didn't know how I was going to do it.

And here was way that I could do it, because they said you could be a beginner.

I was 53 when I started playing.

I didn't play growing up.

So it was a whole new experience for me.

It became just as important part of my life.

There's a couple of unique things about older adults trying to play music for the first time, or coming back to music after a long break.

Sometimes the first note is the most difficult one to play coming up with, you know, courage to, just pick up an instrument and start playing is often the biggest hurdle.

And once they get going, they get hooked very quickly and they keep coming back week after week.

They needed percussion players in the New Horizons band.

And I said, well, that'll be great.

What the heck?

It'll be fun.

They haven't asked me to leave.

So it's kinda great, a great year and a half later.

I joined the band at its inception 22 years ago and been playing ever since.

I'd never played in the band before, so it was really beginners-ville for for me.

Yeah, I was terrified.

And I was like, probably for the first couple of years that I was here at PMAC But there's such a wonderful, welcoming group of people that they just made it okay.

Russ prefaces a lot of his time with us that your best is good enough.

You learn that, you're going to make mistakes all the time, and you just learn how to find your way back in.

And the more and more you do it, the better and better you get at it.

And then the mistakes don't matter quite so much.

If you're still a beginner, you can hop into the group and play what you're able to play and sit out on what you're not able to play yet.

And as you grow as a musician in time through the group, you can play a little bit more in a little bit more, and no one else in the group or the ensemble is going to think you're holding them back.

It really clicked with me that the ensemble was about so much more than the music.

It was really about the opportunity for people to get together and form a little musical community and meet other people, new people, and allows very different personalities, people from very different backgrounds, to share space together and have something really wonderful happen.

It requires presence and focus because your eyes got to be focused.

I'm getting ready for the next note.

My fingers are waiting.

I mean, I'm present in the moment.

And I am not somewhere else.

It's a it's a Zen meditation of a sort.

You can't be in the foulest of mood.

And things could have been horrible all day long.

And you come into the New Horizons band, and you play with your friends and you leave feeling great.

It's really happy.

It really changes your your perspective on things.

This is something I hear from a lot of the participants in the band that, you're so focused on making music and the joy of making music that the entire rest of the world melts away around you, and, it's becomes the most important two hours of their week to make sure that I cannot miss this because it's the best possible thing for my mental health and my well-being.

So about a week before a concert, we practiced, and I played it terribly, and I looked at Russ and he looked at me afterwards and he said to me, you know, you could be sitting at home on your couch just watching lousy TV, right now, but you're in here, you're working your tail off and you're exercising your brain.

And I thought, yeah, that's just what I needed to hear.

My my doctor and I talk about music.

He says breathing is good for people.

And as they get older, they don't breathe this good.

And they're subject to all sorts of breathing ailments.

And also it feeds your brain.

So he he's picked up on my involved with music and sees it as part of staying healthy.

Yeah, it's it's almost like a, like a, a drug with hopefully not very many side effects that I can tell.