Photo © Eric Ortner
The Violin Lesson
I was eight or nine when I picked up my first violin. Much of my childhood is a blur, but I remember clearly the day the orchestra music teacher went from class to class to spread the joy and power of music to the impoverished and culturally malnourished in my grade school. There were many.
Any excitement about the break in our routine quickly turned to boredom and disinterest when the teacher produced a violin. The only kid who was thrilled was the one whose parents loved classical music. The one whose limited record collection consisted of The Jungle Book and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.
I let the teacher guide my hands through a scratchy version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” before a compulsory audience whose reality was government-subsidized school lunches and survival in a rapidly disintegrating neighborhood. Drug busts were common. Our friendly neighborhood butcher was butchered in his own shop, with his own knives. This was no place for little white lambs. Mary took them to the suburbs.
Still, the violin was my first memorable opportunity to make music. I enjoyed it.
When I told my parents, they were pleased. My father played the violin as a child. He and his family lived out the Depression in a vacant field near Youngstown, Ohio, in a cabin my grandfather built from scavenged wooden crates and palates. Dad grew up eating dandelion leaves and wild mustard greens. Yet his older sister, Aunt Ruth, would take him to hear the symphony orchestra.
Thanks to the GI bill, Dad was able to go to college and graduate with degrees in biology, psychology, and liberal arts. He was a poet/artist-turned-company-man and watched with consternation as his two older sons dismissed the idea of higher education and choose the military even after a decade of exposure to Vietnam. He saw in me, his youngest, a glimmer of hope. Perhaps I would be the one to take up the cause, to go to university and become a doctor.
Unions fought, the energy crisis grew, and Richard Nixon monopolized the news and interrupted my afternoon cartoons. Folks traded American-made eight-cylinder cars for tiny four-cylinder Japanese imports. The demise of Akron, Ohio, and along with it, the promise of a decent job with a high school education was spelled out clearly in the words “steel-belted radial tires.”
I had said the magic word, violin. From his own past, my father heard its mournful cry. His youngest boy, a clueless, optimistic, C student, stuck in a failing school system, could only benefit from as square an influence as being in an orchestra. Musical and mathematical aptitudes go hand in hand. By God, let there be music!
My aunt Ruth was summoned and brought forth from the family crypt a violin, THE violin. I opened the case as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. It was ancient and fragile and smelled of old wood and resin. The bridge was cracked and the horsehair bow frayed. I was afraid to touch it.
“When I was young,” my father said, “I would polish the wood with a Brazil nut.” He was serious. He was lucky to have had such an extravagant thing in his youth. I was overwhelmed.
I was also the quintessential nerd. I couldn’t walk around the corner without fear of getting the crap beaten out of me. As if my pure-white, wispy blond hair, parted on the side like a Dennis the Menace comb-over with a close block taper in back didn’t set me apart. As if the plaid pants and matching Geranimal wide-collared rayon shirts weren’t an advertisement to kick my ass. I had inadvertently summoned upon myself a family tradition I didn’t even know existed. I was to make my way though what my sister-in-law calls the ghetto and I’ve come to call “the hood,” carrying my father’s cherished violin.
Let me tell you, it was awful.
To be nine years old, a little bit hyper, a natural-born klutz, and given the care and responsibility of a priceless ancient relic. I was constantly afraid that I would break something or worse, that someone would steal it and break it on purpose. How could I protect this delicate gift if I couldn’t protect myself? As if things weren’t bad enough, the violin set me apart from everyone else at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for all the wrong reasons. It became an albatross. I did not want it, but I could not say no.
To make matters worse, I was blessed with a good ear but saddled with the one instrument notorious for being unforgiving for even the slightest error in finger placement. My father loved to listen to classical music, but rather than being an inspiration, it made me cringe all the more. I hated the sound of my own awful playing.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I am mildly dyslexic. I don’t do well with rows and columns, reading music was a chore. I never got to the point where I was able to look at notes and hear the sound in my head or equate finger position to a mark on the page. It became a game of tortuous trial and error and rote memorization of every song. I never made music. I did not have fun. I did not excel.
There is a compartment in a violin case for resin, extra strings, and in my case a mute for the bridge. I had bargain resin, which came in chunks, rather than the fancy stuff surrounded by cork. These loose pieces I kept in a tiny glass dish that fit nicely in the partition and allowed easy access when the case was on the ground and open. When I closed the case, however, and lifted it by the handle, things would shift. The bowl would clunk and its contents offer a muffled tinkle from within.
Every day I’d don my Buster Brown Oxford shoes and walk to and from school along heaving cracked sidewalks displaced by the roots of ancient oak trees. Clunk, tinkle, clunk, tinkle. I’d pass the gas station with the barking German Shepherd and stretches of overgrown bushes and chain link fences that nervously shielded mealy, barren yards littered with broken bicycles and plastic toys. Clunk, tinkle, clunk tinkle. Block after block of peeling-gray and dusty-red homes with broken porch swings and rusted cars in the driveway. A sad, scary journey punctuated by heavy schoolbooks and an awkward violin case.
Clunk, tinkle, clunk, tinkle.
I walked alone, trying not to show my fear, trying to walk quickly but without making too much noise, praying to get home without trouble. Every Good Boy Does Fine.
My father’s heart attacks were the final straw. My parents, my mother actually, cut their losses, sold the house, and moved to a suburb. I protested to the point of getting grounded, but was still unable to avoid getting enrolled in orchestra at my new junior high school.
There I was introduced to fresh-faced white kids brimming with confidence from private lessons and nice instruments, new instruments! Even their basic musical scores were well beyond my limited experience. It was a complete culture shock, I became a laughing stock. I still didn’t fit in, and believe me there is no bell curve to aid a bad violinist. But the worst was yet to come. The public humiliation of chair trials. Oh Lord.
My only recourse was passive resistance. I conveniently forgot either my instrument or my music. My bridge broke while tuning and I neglected to tell my parents. A few notes from my teacher and a failing grade finally bought my freedom, but cost me my anonymity.
I’m 43 years old now. Dad is dead, Ruth is dead, most of my father’s family is dead. Akron is ancient history. I no longer suffer bullies, and I know how to say no. This afternoon my wife asked me to help her clean a closet. I came across my dreaded violin. It greeted me as I took it from the shelf. Clunk, tinkle, clunk tinkle.
Shit. I opened the case. It smelled of old wood and resin. The bow, at some point restrung with synthetic fibers, was yellow and brittle. The violin still had no bridge, and the cord that held the tail piece in place had weathered and cracked; a family heirloom beaten and scuffed, the fingerboard worn with vertical stripes. E A D G It literally made me sick and nervous to handle it. Funny how small it was when stacked against what it came to represent; so obviously a child’s violin in my adult hands.
I checked inside with a flashlight to see if it had any markings. Stradivarius Cremona. 1716.
“Made in Germany?”
Just a cheap violin, a father’s earnest gift to a boy who showed interest, a gesture of hope for something better, a call to a rich and fulfilling life.
I remembered an episode of Kung Fu where Cain gives away his father’s sextant, an heirloom of sorts. The old man asked why Cain gave away something obviously important to him, and the young Cain reflects upon the Buddhist teachings to avoid the desire for possessions and the greed and suffering that comes with it. The old man then teaches him the sacred middle path. There is a difference between possessing something and being possessed by something.
Ten minutes later I called my brother at work. He is the collector in the family and dabbles in guitar and banjo.
“Hey, Kev, It’s me...”
“Oh, hey, what’s up?”
“I’m going to send you Dad’s old violin, you want it delivered to your place or the shop?”
“Really? Cool! I didn’t know you had that. Hell, I didn’t know that still existed.”
An hour later I was at the UPS store taking one last look at the battered case held together with strips of gooey electrical tape, while the clerk calculated boxes and costs.
“Would you like to insure this for more than one hundred dollars, sir?”
The nine-year-old grasshopper within me stayed quiet but looked to the adult.
“Nah,” I said. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”
I walked out of the store, and I was free!
Copyright © 2008 by Michael S. McKlusky
