STRUNG APART
Music runs through my veins. My parents were musical. Mom played piano, dad played violin. I started piano at 3. I'd tinkled the keys since I could reach them.
I got good at piano. My parents paid for expensive teachers. At school, I wanted to try another instrument.
I picked violin because my dad played it and it's easier to carry than a piano.
5th grade. Started violin lessons in school and learned with the, ahem, “orchestra”, while perfecting my posture.
Six weeks in, I got a stiff neck or a cold or something that hurt my neck really badly and I couldn't turn it and I sure couldn't play violin anymore.
That ordeal ended swiftly.
In high school, we had to pick an instrument and I liked The Blue Kangaroo who played bass violin on a cartoon show. I liked blues music and that vibrational deep bass beat a lot.
I played the bass because of The Blue Kangaroo.
Now I don't know who carried his bass violin around for him, but I do know that that was the dumbest decision I'd made thus far in my nascent life.
I liked playing the thing, I'd badumpbompbump in my room at home, but walking with a bass back and forth to school every weekend was what made me hate every flute player evermore.
Sticking it out as long as I could (2 months), I relinquished all but the piano. I played piano in school assemblies and other places, so that was cool enough. Until....
Guitar. Hippie era, you know?
I played guitar because of boys.
Boys? I think so. I think that was the reason. I couldn't break away from string instruments, apparently. There were “coffee shops”. Smoky places, dark and mysterious, where teenagers sat around and guitar was the groove.
Who didn't want to be groovy?
So here's what happened with this third attempt at stringing my life together: I tripped on my guitar in the middle of the first night of owning it. How humiliating.
My mom couldn't have been more mad.
It was in its case, but maybe not out of the way. It was dark. I stumbled to the kitchen at night and tripped over my guitar and smashed it real good in the backside.
“Good money” (never learned what “bad money” might be) had been spent on that guitar and mom wasn't getting me another one. She taped it up and made me take it to lessons and learn to play it that way, broken. The teacher, a nice man, explained to my mother that the sound was affected, even though it technically could still be strummed.
I learned “Downtown”, an easy guitar solo. And Batman. I had to learn the Batman theme song.
But after that, guitar lost it's allure. I liked listening to the boys who played it, but my three strikes with string instruments had strung apart.
Thanks, Dad, for the violin. And the stiff neck.
Thanks, Blue Kangaroo, for the bass and sore back.
Thanks, boys, for the guitar and wooing me with one.
In college, I finally smarted up and picked a smaller case as second instrument to piano. I picked trumpet. No problems with trumpet. I liked it.
But you know what? I listen to flute players and laugh with envy.
Always pick the flute.
Just Another Lori Story
