Sharp Shooter

I haven’t written anything new this week, but I am posting an essay I wrote more than twenty years ago. It isn’t particularly relevant, and in some ways it feels outdated, but it celebrates music in my life, and I like that. As for my daughter’s violin, it’s stashed in a closet someplace, unplayed for many years, but her stint as a fledgling musician is one of many forays that sparked her spirit. She rode horses, too, and unlike me, she swims, and she never shies away from difficult things. I watch her with love and pride from a great distance now. Maybe that’s what this essay is really about.

My daughter is standing in the corner of a white room in a house near the Mesa sampling violas, and I forgive myself for all the mistakes I made because somehow everything in my life has led to this moment.  The house belongs to a tall hulking man named Stephen Derek who builds, repairs, rents, and sells string instruments. He is helping her to choose and making sure she listens.  One viola sounds dark and rich, another bright, with glimmers of yellow. Sometimes there are rasps and plinks but every now and then a long pure ribbon comes out just right. He hands her a bow with a flicker of abalone embedded in its tip: “Move a little closer to the bridge if you want,” he says, “and relax. The best musicians are like sharp shooters. They find the sweet spot right away.”

 There are cabinets filled with violins – satiny amber curves of wood, each a song even in its silence. Outside, the winter light is beginning to blush across the mountains but here there is no time, really, just a young girl concentrating on the sound and the feel of the instrument in her hand, her lips a narrow line, her eyes for a moment closed, and a multi-textured series of scales flung like sumptuous scarves into the air. 

 I don’t know how to talk about music. I experience it with the pre-verbal impressions of a baby – it is vast, mysterious, and compelling. My father played Neapolitan songs whose passionate lyrics needed no translation. Once he brought home an album of Sarah Vaughan who wore an orange dress on the cover and sang in smooth honey saunters, sweet and unexpected. I remember Cuban rhythms by Perez Prado perfect for cocktail parties we never had, and a tune called Begin the Beguine played by Artie Shaw. My mother drank tea from tall glasses and hummed the melancholy airs of her Russian Jewish ancestors. The piano in her childhood home had been sacrificed for firewood, or so the story goes, and whether true or not, my legacy as a non-musician was sealed at an early age. I knew of kids who studied piano and ballet, but lessons were expensive and far beyond the realm of necessity in which my family resided. 

 I didn’t care. I had my radio for company, even on my pillow late at night.  My father was disdainful of the top 40 rock and roll on the AM broadcasts my brothers and I favored, but we managed to sneak in plenty of listening. I even heard the teen-age boys singing do wop a cappella in the McDonald Avenue subway station, sounding like a gang of angels with Brylcreem-sculpted ducktails and tight Continental pants. My tastes were cheap and basic: a little sentiment, a little rhythm, a catchy tune, and I was hooked.

 In the sixties and seventies, music married poetry, or so it seemed to me, and I loved how the words of Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell could stand on their own, speaking to the heart, giving voice to my longing and confusion. Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne: sometimes the tunes were haunting, but for me, it was all about the poem within the song.  There came my high and lonesome years, a college dropout traveling Greyhounds and crashing with friends.  I discovered Bluegrass in Syracuse, New York, and lived my life to its fast frenzied picking and its yearning voices, oddly dissonant even in their harmonies. I was a rambler and a wayfaring stranger and I knew my way around a minor key with nowhere else to go.

 Once, living in a basement apartment in Chicago, I encountered an unbearable ringing silence and began to acknowledge the emptiness in myself.  In one of those serendipitous quirks of fate that point to guardian angels, I found a hi-fi on a pile of trash in a nearby alley, carried it home, and based on faith borrowed a stack of classical records from the public library.  I plugged it in, put on the record, and a miracle filled the room.  It was Beethoven first: Piano Sonata No. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 73. I didn’t know I had that much emotion inside of me. I didn’t know I could connect so fully with another spirit, another time, with all of humanity, perhaps. Wordlessly.

 I had yet to meet the vibrant colors of Bach, whose Brandenberg Concerti filled my rooms with cathedral light, whose Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire so perfectly expressed the universal yearnings of mankind. I had yet to sit in a church at night hearing Handel’s Messiah and singing along with a friend’s hand in mine as the world outside quietly transformed itself in the surprise of new snow. I had yet to hear Vivaldi or Scarlatti playfully performed in Venice, notes like laughter and flirtation, like crystal chandeliers and wind chimes, or the flawlessness of a Mozart piano trio, like a white marble sculpture come to life. 

 There is the purity of my sister’s voice, preserved on tape, and etched forever in my soul, and a scratchy recording of my father singing a homesick song on a wax record made in 1944 at a USO center in Lompoc. And then there was the time Fred Martin and his high school gospel choir sang through all our differences and turned a spring day into a festival on our Los Olivos campus. More recently, I have loved the sounds of Dunn’s middle school students singing Dona Nobis Pacem in rounds to the seniors at the Lutheran Home, accompanied by Marc on his guitar.  I sing along and hope my mistakes are inconspicuous.

I’ve walked a long, long way and I’ve listened to the wind and I know that sometimes life feels like nothing but loss. I’ve been a hothead and I’ve been wrong, and it’s much too late for a lot of things, but now and then there comes a joyful noise and my heart is willing to receive. I’ve learned that music is as elemental and essential as earth and air. It is connection, comfort, and expression, and I am in awe of all who know its vocabulary, who can play an instrument, who can be the song. I will appreciate without creating, and maybe that’s enough.

 So I sit in a white room near the Mesa surrounded by an artillery comprised solely of instruments of peace and watch my daughter learn what I never could, transcending me in every possible way. Like a sharp shooter, I have found the sweet spot, and I know it.