I have been watching a lot of
Christmas concerts on TV lately, and my eyes always are drawn to the orchestra's string
section. As I watch the violinists,
their bows deftly gliding in perfect unison over the strings, I can’t help but
think that I could have been sitting right there with them.
Back when I was in the fifth
grade, my friend Carole started taking violin lessons. Of course, everything
Carole did, I also wanted to do, so I was determined to convince my parents to
let me take violin lessons, too.
“Puhleeeeze?” I begged them, my
hands clasped together. “I promise I’ll practice for a whole hour every single
day!”
My parents looked skeptical. “Do you promise you will stick with it if we
say yes?” my mother asked.
“Cross my heart!” I answered.
One week later, I excitedly
accompanied Carole to the home of Mr. G., her violin teacher.
Mr. G.’s house was the spookiest
place I had ever seen. It was a huge, rambling mansion with thick,
burgundy-colored velvet drapes that blocked out the daylight. His doorbell played
Beethoven.
Mr. G., like his house, also had
a spooky air about him. His long, yellowish-gray hair was combed straight back
(in an era when everyone else had crew cuts), and he was wearing a burgundy
velvet smoking-jacket (probably made from leftover material from his drapes)
and a white silk ascot.
Unfortunately, Carole already was
in a more advanced violin class, so I was forced to take my lesson all alone,
in a dark, musty room where the only source of light came from the top of the
stand that held my sheet music.
The first three weeks, I
practiced religiously every night. But despite my enthusiasm, my playing still
sounded as if I were torturing cats.
The people who lived in the apartment upstairs complained about the
racket. Even my parents complained and begged me to stop practicing. But I refused to stop. My ambition was to become a famous concert
violinist.
There also was the bubble-gum
award to strive for.
The bubble-gum award was a weekly
ritual that Mr. G. had invented to reward students whose progress impressed
him. The first few weeks, I received the bubble-gum award after every lesson.
This “honor” involved standing
with my mouth open and my eyes closed, while Mr. G., who probably had missed
his true calling as a baseball pitcher, tossed a big gumball into my mouth.
I always looked forward to the
gumball ritual…until the day Mr. G. tossed it with a little too much force and
it slid right down my throat.
As I stood there choking, my face
turning crimson, Mr. G. ran around the room, his arms flailing wildly as he
shouted, “Water! Water!” (as if he thought a glass of water somehow would
magically appear). Fortunately, I
managed to cough up the gumball on my own.
To this day, I still believe that
Mr. G.’s gumball ritual was what led Heimlich to invent his maneuver.
Too soon, the novelty of playing
the violin began to wear off. In fact,
it got to the point where I dreaded my hour of practicing every night so much,
I invented a way to get out of it. I
taped one of my practice sessions, then I’d lock myself in my room, stretch out
on my bed with a movie magazine, and play the tape instead of actually
practicing. My parents never knew the difference.
But Mr. G did.
“You haven’t been practicing,” he
accused me one afternoon after I’d hit enough sour notes to curdle milk.
“What’s wrong?”
I just shrugged.
“It’s really a shame,” he said.
“I had big hopes for you. In fact, I wanted you to play in the Youth
Symphonette Orchestra.”
My eyes widened. “Me? In an
orchestra?!”
That was all the incentive I
needed to make me resume my practicing with a vengeance. A few months later, to our delight, both
Carole and I were accepted into the orchestra.
The night of our first public
performance, I was so nervous, even my eyebrows were sweating. Perhaps it was because our audience was what
you might call “captive.” We were
playing at the state industrial school, the youth detention center.
Adding to our stage fright was
the fact that the kids in the audience all had been given apples to eat (because,
according to one of the YDC directors, apples were a more healthful snack than
candy or popcorn). Considering that by
no stretch of the imagination did our audience members look like a Bach or
Beethoven kind of crowd, Carole and I were certain that the minute our
orchestra started to play, we would be bombarded with fruit.
I really enjoyed playing in the
youth orchestra. Carole and I were able to travel all over the state on the
official orchestra tour-bus, which made us feel like minor celebrities. We also hoped to progress to playing in a big, prestigious orchestra someday, like the Boston Pops, when we were older.
Neither of us owned our own
violin, however. We rented them from Mr. G. for $1.50 per week, which was
applied toward the actual purchase cost of the instruments so we could own them
in the future - in about 25 years.
One night, back when I was in the
seventh grade, my friend Terry, who lived down the street, and I were hanging
out in my room, playing records and pretending to be famous dancers.
Just before Terry arrived, I’d
been practicing my violin lessons and hastily had set the violin down on the
nightstand next to my bed.
As Terry and I were doing our
finest impression of the Rockettes, kicking our legs high in unison, Terry
accidentally kicked the nightstand. My precious violin went airborne and landed
on the floor with a sickening cracking sound. Wide-eyed, we collectively held
our breaths as I gathered the courage to inch my way toward the instrument to
check it out. To our horror, it had a lightning-bolt shaped crack all the way
down the front of it. Even worse, I was only about two months away from finally
owning it.
I can’t remember ever feeling
more terrified to confess something to my parents.
Let’s just say they weren’t
pleased. And as it turned out, Mr. G.
was even less pleased.
“My policy is if you break it,
you buy it!” he said. “So the broken violin is all yours now.”
I never touched a violin
again after that, mainly because my parents refused to start from scratch,
renting another violin for $1.50 per week. And I sure as heck couldn’t afford
it on my 50-cents allowance. Shortly after I left the orchestra, Carole also decided to quit.
So we never did become the next
Itzhak Perlman or Charlie Daniels.
And we never found out whatever became of
Mr. G.
I have the strong feeling he
might have ended up in prison for choking some poor kid to death with a
gumball.
# #
#
CLICK HERE ====> https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/384106 |