Music lessons

The summer I was 21, I took the bus downtown to Branders Music Shop to buy a violin. I had known the Branders all my life; they were the stout, kind couple who lived at the end of our block. When I was small, I used to crawl under their split-rail fence to pick the starry blue scilla that bloomed in their grass each spring.

Their shop was a small, bustling place, much like Mrs. Brander herself. It had a wall of guitars, shelves of ticking metronomes, narrow drawers of sheet music, displays of noisy-looking drum sets, and, in locked glass cases, glowing golden-brown against shimmering dark blue velvet -- violins.

There was usually music in our busy house, but it was mostly background noise. Nobody took it very seriously. Sometimes it was The Beatles, singing tinnily out of my sister's portable radio in the hot dark of a summer night. Sometimes it was Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute" rotating on the turntable while we ate; we called it "dinner music," and it was meant to add a calm air to our hectic meals, which resembled supper at a Medieval inn: twelve hungry people seated around two long wooden tables heaped with gallon bowls of mashed potatoes and green beans, platters of porkchops, someone dropping a fork, someone spilling the milk, everybody talking. Sometimes it was my father singing "But Daddy, You Been on My Mind" while he cracked the ice for his evening martini, or my brother Paul, pounding out "Fur Elise," laboriously on the piano.

My father had bought the piano one Christmas as a gift for my mother, who had played as a child. But she seldom played this one; I guess cooking and cleaning and shopping for the twelve of us kept her pretty busy, and when she had a moment to sit down she preferred solitude and silence. Making more noise no longer interested her, not even pretty noise.

The rest of us took to the piano avidly, though without any discipline; we pitched fights in the living room to determine who would get to play; we swarmed around it like puppies, learning where middle C was and how to stumble through a few books of simple tunes. In December, we thumped out Christmas carol after Christmas carol. I kept my foot pressed firmly on the sustain pedal, no matter what my mother advised, to make the music "flow."

All of this is in some way the reason why, on a summer day when I was 21, I opened the jingling front door of Branders Music, a borrowed $300 in my pocket, and picked out a violin.

The violin had a name: David, like my brother. The clerk assured me that it was a fine, mid-level instrument, perfect for someone just starting out. He showed me how to peer through the F hole to find the label; how to tighten the horse hair bow, though not too much, and how to rosin it, but not too much; how to hold the violin between shoulder and chin. The rest of it would be up to me--me, and a teacher.

I tested its heft, admired the lovely mirror-image swirls of grain on the glossy back, wiped away the white sticky rosin near the bridge, lifted it up and clamped it into place with my jaw, and -- then what? I had no idea how to produce even a single note.

(to be continued)

A note on the photos: My oldest brother, John Patrick, as a one-man band. And my sisters and me, listening to the stereo one winter evening.