Things I Learned From a Ukulele Named Sir Madam Francis Frank

A Two-Hundred-Year-Old Tree, Three Wise Men, and the Unexpected Lessons Hidden in Four Strings

By Rachel Y. Hill, DNP, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, AHN-BC, HWNC-BC

I've written some heavier posts this year.

Empires collapsing.

Cocoons.

Permission to reset.

The whole dramatic arc.

Frank has been sitting quietly through all of it, strapped to my hip, four strings, mildly judgmental.

I think it's time Frank got a post that isn't about my business falling apart.

Frank deserves better.

So here's what a two-hundred-year-old tree, turned into a ukulele, turned into an instrument with a name that refuses to pick a gender, has actually taught me.

A Little History Before the Humor

Before I get into the lessons, I want to give Frank his due as an actual piece of American history, not just a good bit for a blog post.

"Liberty Tree" isn't a name I made up for my own tree.

It's a real tradition, one that runs straight back to the years before the American Revolution.

The original Liberty Tree was a stately elm in Boston, planted around 1646, standing near what's now the Boston Common.

In 1765, colonists gathered under its branches to protest the Stamp Act.

From that first act of defiance, the tree became a rallying point. The ground beneath it was even nicknamed "Liberty Hall."

The Sons of Liberty met there.

Protests were staged there.

When the Stamp Act was repealed the following year, Bostonians hung lanterns in its branches to celebrate.

The tree stood for the growing resistance to British rule right up until August 1775, when it was finally cut down by loyalist forces.

A group who apparently understood exactly how much the tree had come to symbolize and wanted it gone precisely because of that.

When an Idea Outlives the Tree

What happened next is the part I find genuinely moving.

The idea didn't die with the Boston elm.

Towns across the thirteen colonies began naming their own significant trees "Liberty Trees."

A large oak here.

An elm there.

Whatever tree in whatever town had become the natural gathering place for people who wanted to talk about freedom out loud, in public, under branches instead of behind closed doors.

Where a town didn't have a suitable tree, they raised a "Liberty Pole" instead.

The symbol could exist anywhere, tree or no tree.

The tradition even crossed the ocean.

When revolution broke out in France decades later, French revolutionaries started naming and planting their own liberty trees too.

What began as one elm in Boston branched—no pun intended, or maybe entirely intended—into a custom that outlived the specific tree that started it.

The Liberty Tree of Maysville, Kansas

That's the tradition Frank's tree belonged to.

Not the famous Boston elm itself, long gone by the time this one was even a sapling.

But a tree in Maysville, Kansas, that carried the same name and, I'd argue, the same spirit.

A living thing that stood through generations, weathered what came at it, and eventually got recognized as worth protecting rather than just cutting down and forgetting.

Maysville isn't Boston.

It's a small town, the kind of place where a two-hundred-year-old tree is genuinely known by the people who live near it.

Not a plaque behind a velvet rope in a city center.

I like that better, honestly.

Frank's tree didn't need a Revolutionary crowd gathered beneath it to matter.

It just needed to survive long enough, in one unremarkable Kansas town, for someone to finally notice what was worth saving when the lightning and the termites came for it.

A Different Shape for the Same Continuing

So when I say Frank is a Liberty Tree, I don't mean that loosely.

I mean that this ukulele is carrying forward a specifically American tradition of naming a living thing after the idea of freedom itself.

Letting it stand as witness to a community for as long as it can.

And then, when it finally falls, one way or another, finding some way to let what it stood for keep traveling.

Boston's elm became a symbol people still write about two and a half centuries later.

Maysville's tree became a ukulele that helps me remember six years of clumsy chords and a NICU waiting room.

Neither ending is smaller than the other.

They're just different shapes for the same kind of continuing.

It Took a Village and a Few Good Men

Frank didn't get to me on his own, and I don't want to tell this story as if he did.

There's a small cast of people behind this ukulele, and every single one of them deserves to be named.

Not just gestured at.

It started with Greg Huntington.

He's the man who was spending his time at the Ronald McDonald House sharing ukuleles with the children staying there.

He's the one who handed me my very first ukulele to borrow, back when my grandson was in the NICU and I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't wringing them.

That loan turned into a habit I never really recovered from.

It turns out that once you've had a stranger's kindness put an instrument in your hands during the worst week of your life, you don't just give the instrument back and walk away clean.

Greg, My Ukulele Dealer

I ended up buying more ukuleles from Greg after that first one.

His uke business is its own kind of beautiful, and I want to say it plainly instead of just mentioning it in passing.

His company helps employ women in developing countries who make the bags his ukuleles travel in.

And he personally teaches sick children—and just as importantly, their siblings, the ones who don't always get thought of during a hospital stay—the gift of music.

He became my uke dealer.

And I mean that with real affection.

I have a habit now, and Greg has been more than happy to keep satisfying it, one ukulele at a time.

If you're ever looking for a reason to believe small businesses can carry big hearts, Greg's is exhibit A.

When Kindness Finds Its Way Into Wood

Then there's Kurt Evans.

Kurt saw how much I loved my grandson.

Really saw it, the way people sometimes see something in you that you haven't fully said out loud yourself.

And he wanted to do something meaningful with that.

So he reached out to Kelly Stillfield, a man with his own story of love and loss, to help build something that would hold all of it.

The grandson.

The grief.

The love that doesn't have anywhere else to go sometimes.

Kelly is the friend I mentioned earlier, the one who actually built the ukulele with me from that rescued Liberty Tree wood.

What I didn't say before is that Kelly came into this project already carrying his own losses.

His own reasons to understand exactly what it means to put love into something you can hold onto when the person you love most can't be held onto in the usual way anymore.

Three Separate Kindnesses, One Extraordinary Instrument

None of these three men set out to build a ukulele with me on purpose, in the sense of planning it from day one.

Greg just wanted sick kids and their siblings to have music.

Kurt just wanted to do something kind for a grandmother he cared about.

Kelly brought his own grief and craftsmanship to a project someone else asked him to help with.

And somehow, all three of those separate, ordinary kindnesses braided together into Sir Madam Francis Frank.

Without any one of them, this ukulele simply doesn't exist.

I think that's worth remembering every time I play it.

Frank isn't really mine alone.

He's the physical evidence of at least three men deciding, independently, that kindness was worth their time.

Eight Lessons From Sir Madam Francis Frank

1. Survival Doesn't Require Dignity

Frank started life as the Liberty Tree of Maysville, Kansas.

Got struck by lightning.

Then got a termite infestation on top of it.

And was rescued only after all of that.

That is not a dignified origin story.

That is a tree that got knocked down, then eaten, then saved anyway, in an unremarkable little town that most people driving through would never think twice about.

And somehow, that's the tree that became an instrument.

Not the one that had a smooth, uneventful two hundred years in a more famous zip code.

I think about that every time something in my own life goes sideways in a similarly undignified way.

Struck once.

Then nibbled on for good measure.

Apparently, that's not disqualifying.

Apparently, that might just be the origin story.

2. You're Allowed to Hold Two Names at Once

Sir Madam Francis Frank is, objectively, a ridiculous name.

And I will defend it to my grave.

It's got the masculine and the feminine both sitting right there in the open.

Not fighting each other.

Not needing to be resolved into one tidy identity.

I didn't set out to make a philosophical point when I named a ukulele.

But I've noticed I keep returning to that same freedom in my own life lately.

The freedom to be more than one thing at once.

To hold contradictions without needing to iron them flat.

Frank never apologizes for the name.

Neither should the rest of us, honestly.

3. Clumsy Hands Still Make Real Music

I am not a professional.

I have played for almost six years, and I am, generously, fine.

My chord changes have the elegance of a shopping cart with a bad wheel.

And it doesn't matter.

Because the point was never the performance.

The point was having something to do with my hands in a NICU waiting room, all those years ago.

When Greg handed me a borrowed ukulele, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Nobody asked to see my calluses before they let me hold that instrument.

Frank doesn't ask either.

I think a lot of us are quietly waiting for permission to be bad at something in public.

And the permission was never actually required.

4. The Back of the Instrument Matters as Much as the Front

Everyone sees the front of a ukulele.

The strings.

The frets.

The part you actually play.

Almost nobody looks at the back.

Nobody even asks about it, honestly, until they happen to catch a glimpse.

And then something shifts in their face.

Wow.

Colors.

Stuff.

The inner child comes out to play, right there in real time.

Because they'd assumed, without ever quite saying so, that Frank was just going to be another plain ukulele.

Same shape.

Same wood tone.

Nothing to really look at twice.

And then the back turns around, and there's a whole world back there.

I watch people get quietly amazed in a way adults don't usually let themselves be amazed by much of anything anymore.

The Whole World We Don't See

I think about how often I do the exact same thing to people.

I look at someone—a stranger, a colleague, someone I've already decided I understand—and I assume the front is the whole story.

Plain ukulele.

Nothing to really look at twice.

I don't carry the wonder of a child into that first look.

The way a kid does.

The way I imagine God does when He looks at any of us.

Not the assessment of:

Is this useful?

Is this impressive?

Is this what I expected?

Just the amazement of:

Oh, there you are, and you're so much more than what's facing me right now.

We are not just what we present on the front.

We are souls with a purpose and a passion that, underneath everything, equals love.

Every single one of us has a back nobody's bothered to look at yet.

A Prayer Folded Into the Wood

I designed the back of Frank myself.

I filled it with artwork for my grandchildren, including the one I only get to love from a distance now.

And I believe, in a way I can't fully prove and don't need to, that the prayer folded into that wood is eternal.

Not decorative.

Not sentimental.

Actually eternal, the way a prayer is supposed to be.

If someone finds this ukulele centuries from now—in a time capsule, or the way archaeologists found Pompeii preserved under ash, frozen exactly as it was in its last ordinary moment—they will find that prayer sitting there in the wood, waiting.

They won't know my name.

They won't know the tree was called Frank.

Or that lightning hit it.

Or that termites almost finished the job before rescue got there first.

But they'll see the prayer.

And somehow, I believe, it will make sense to them anyway.

Some things don't need translation.

They just need to be found.

5. Naming the Tree Came Before Naming the Instrument

We called the tree Frank before it was ever anything else.

That order matters to me more than I expected it to.

The tree got a name.

A relationship.

And a little bit of reverence.

Before it ever became useful.

I don't think that's how most of us operate by default.

We tend to name things after they've proven their worth.

After they've become a finished product we can show off.

Frank got named while it was still just a tree with a rough decade behind it.

There's something in that about loving things—and people—before they've become anything impressive yet.

6. You Cannot Rush a Two-Hundred-Year-Old Tree

And you cannot rush yourself either.

It took two centuries for that wood to become what it is.

It took me almost six years of unglamorous, unpaid, un-Instagrammed practice to be able to play a full song on it without stopping to swear under my breath.

Neither timeline was fast.

Neither timeline, in hindsight, was wrong.

7. Sometimes the Wisest Thing You Can Do Is Not Overthink It

I did not sit down and rationally decide that a ukulele should teach me about resilience, identity, grief, and patience.

I just kept a promise to myself to keep playing.

Badly.

Consistently.

For almost six years.

And the lessons showed up on their own schedule, the way lessons tend to.

Frank was never trying to teach me anything.

I think that's actually the most Frank-like lesson of all:

The profound stuff mostly shows up sideways.

While you're just doing the ordinary thing.

Not performing wisdom for anybody.

8. He Didn't Know How Far the Pieces Would Travel

Frank never knew, standing as a tree for two centuries, that he'd eventually splinter into so many different paths.

A ukulele in my hands.

Sawdust and offcuts that went who knows where.

Pieces of the same wood carrying love and light into lives he'll never personally witness.

He didn't plan that.

He just stood there.

Got struck.

Got eaten by termites.

Got rescued.

And eventually surrendered to being broken down so he could be built back up into something else entirely.

That's not a small thing, if you sit with it.

Surrender, in Frank's case, wasn't defeat.

It was the only way anything new could come from what was left of him.

What We Do With What Happens to Us

I don't think Frank had a choice about the lightning.

Or the termites.

Or the two hundred years of weather that came before either.

None of us get to choose all our circumstances.

Not the storm that hits.

Not what gets into the cracks afterward and tries to finish the job.

But Frank, if a tree could be said to choose anything, chose how to respond to the breaking.

Not by staying broken.

Not by refusing the next stage.

But by letting the breakdown become the raw material for something that could actually go out and touch people.

We don't get to choose most of what happens to us either.

We only get to choose what we do with it once it's already happened.

Frank is proof, in wood and prayer and clumsy chord changes, that the second choice was always the one that mattered more.

Thank You to Frank and the Three Wise Men

I don't know if a ukulele can read a blog post.

But on the off chance it can:

Thank you, Frank, for surviving the lightning and the termites.

Thank you for holding both names at once without complaint.

Thank you for putting up with six years of clumsy hands.

And thank you for letting me carry my grandchildren, all of them, on your back where I can't see them but I always know they're there.

And since Frank can't take all the credit for himself, thank you to the three wise men who connected the dots for me.

None of whom set out to do it together.

And all of whom somehow did.

Greg Huntington, for a borrowed ukulele in a hospital hallway and for every child and sibling your music has reached since.

Kurt Evans, for noticing love and deciding to do something about it.

Kelly Stillfield, for bringing your own story of love and loss into the building of mine, and for having the hands to actually make Frank real.

They didn't follow a star to find me.

They just kept being kind in their own separate directions until the paths happened to cross, right where I needed them to.

Not every post has to end in a cocoon.

Sometimes it can just end with a decent joke, three wise men, and a ukulele named Sir Madam Francis Frank.

Still sitting exactly where I left it.

Waiting for the next terrible chord change.

A Few Questions to Sit With

• What's your version of Frank—something ordinary that's quietly taught you more than you expected?
• Is there a "back of the instrument" in your own life—something meaningful that nobody claps for?
• What would it look like to let yourself be genuinely bad at something, in public, without apologizing for it?

--Dr. Rachel