Facing the Music

The list of all of the musical instruments I have attempted to learn how to play is both long and strange.  It all began with the shining glockenspiel, then an unplayable cardboard cowboy guitar, next came the horrid silver clarinet, the dusty upright piano in the church dining room, the nylon string guitar when I was a college freshman, the Guild six string guitar, the handcrafted Appalachian dulcimer, the former four-string banjo refashioned into a five string banjo, the kid’s tom-tom, the nickel doumbek, and finally yet another guitar complete with an auto tuner.

A relative gave me the glockenspiel when I was nine and I had some fun trying to play it but lost interest fairly quickly. Although it did have pretty red and gold tassels.

Cowboy, Lassie & Hilton are my audience.

The cardboard guitar from Sears Roebuck was a Christmas present when I was ten.   Elvis had taken the country by storm and I was a huge fan.  I wanted to be Elvis (or a singing cowboy).  But as mentioned before, the guitar was unplayable and un-tunable – a mere prop.

Elvis!

When I was twelve we were impelled to choose an instrument and be in the junior band.  Our school has an award winning senior marching band that travelled all over the state so they always needed up and coming members.  I chose the slide trombone.  The teacher kindly pointed out “girls do not play the slide trombone” and handed me the clarinet.   I remember only a few lessons because he was trying to teach us how to read music at the same time. 

 

My mother was really excited to have a musician in the family and immediately set up what she called the Music Room.  It was a tiny room off of the second living room which she decorated with musical items like famous paintings of musicians and the like.  She forced me to go in there every day and then she hid in the kitchen trying not to howl with laughter as I squeaked and squawked away on that hated thing.

 

I made it as far in this endeavor as the first recital and it was agreed upon by all concerned that my time was best spent elsewhere.  But not before we had to buy the uniform - shiny white satin dress shirt, pleated trousers and a purple satin tie.  Ugh.

Which is more awful - the bangs, the glasses or the uniform?

My best friend Mary had taken piano lessons and she and I had fun playing around on that upright in the church.  It had not been tuned in years but we banged away on the usual tunes – "Chopsticks", "Heart and Soul", and I even tried picking out the notes of a few hymns from the hymnbook.  The only one I remember is making a small success of the first few chords of “Holy, Holy, Holy”.  Real lessons might have helped me but it was an expense we could not afford.

When the Great Folk Scare hit in the sixties I found myself enamored by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and I longed for a real guitar.  I met Paul in my first year of college and since he played guitar, I saved up my pennies and he took me to a music store and helped me pick out the best one I could afford.  It had nylon strings and was very hard to play but he taught me some chords and we worked out charts for a few folk songs.  I labored away at that thing for a couple of years with little success.  I developed callouses on the tips of my fingers but that was about it.

The Guild steel string guitar came next, and it was slightly easier to play but that doesn’t mean I could play it any better.  I tried using a pick, I tried using my fingers.  I wanted to be able to play like John Fahey – but I would have settled for John Prine.  Unfortunately I proved hopeless.  I did, however, have an awful lot of fun making a collage on the case.

Collage complete with Donovan, Janis and John Lennon.

At the Newport Folk Festival one year we saw Mimi and Richard Farina.  They played the dulcimer.  I had to have one!  It looked so easy to play.  We found an ad for Appalachian dulcimers hand made by a craftsman named Edd Presnell from Banner Elk, North Carolina, and ordered one made out of walnut.  We found Ed’s card pasted on the inside with his name, address and motto, “If it’s made of wood we might make it.”

The dulcimer was a beautifully crafted instrument but with wooden pegs in wooden holes, it was nearly impossible to tune.  Once again I lost interest.

Walnut dulcimer by Edd Presnell

The banjo belonged to Paul’s grandfather and it only had four strings but since five string banjos had risen in popularity thanks to Pete Seeger, Paul found someone to craft a new neck with five strings.  I wanted to play like Earl Scruggs and tried to convince him to have Scruggs pegs installed, but he insisted I ought to learn the basics first.  Well, so much for the banjo.  I had no interest in frailing.

Years passed and drum circles became the thing.  Everyone I knew had a drum.  I wanted a drum!  How hard could that be to play?  No strings attached!  On an impulse I bought a kid’s tom-tom, repainted it bright red and put black handprints on it for decoration.  That’s about all I did with that because by then I had fallen in love with the shiny nickel doumbek I found at a festival.  What a beauty!

I banged on it a few times and when a famous drum instructor was brought to town for a workshop, I signed up.  There were about thirty people in the class and mine was the only metal doumbek.  Everyone else has wood ones; a few even had beautiful djembes.

I tried, I really tried.  But I just could not seem to get it.  I have no sense of rhythm whatsoever.  The instructor even kindly told me I was very brave to take his class since I was so musically challenged.

Another guitar was gifted to me a few years back.  It was said to be a fairly nice one for a beginner.  I tried it one evening and realized I was having a lot of trouble tuning it not to mention I no longer had callouses so it really hurt my fingers and my hands no longer had the needed strength.  By the time I had the adapter for the tuner I had lost interest.

 

So, while I may have some mad skills as a picture framer and some art skills and the strange abilities to fix things and to make stuff out of nothing (I have been called MarGuyver), and I guess I am a sort of writer, I have at long last come to the conclusion that my only musical talent is the ability to appreciate it in many of its glorious forms – not try to play it myself ever again.  I will be more than content to savor the many blessings of my musical friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

Sick and Tired

March 2015

I don't know how I did it, but I appear to have displeased the Tire Gods.  It all began in March of 2015.  At the end of a snowy icy winter,  I tried sliding out of my rutted driveway over a deep puddle with an inch of ice on top, and I broke through and punctured a tire.  I felt really stupid having done this but the roadside assistance guy made feel less silly when he told me he had done the exact same thing to one of his truck tires the previous week.  I was fortunate that this tire was able to be repaired.

September 2015

On September 2nd of the same year I hit a curb and the tire developed an alarming bulge in the sidewall.  By morning the tire was flat. I called roadside assistance, they were able to inflate the tire and I made it to a tire place and decided to go whole hog and buy a new tire.  Three weeks later, on the 21st, I bought yet another new tire.  So that made two new tires and two still in need of replacing.

In February of 2016 I bought two more new tires.  That brought my count up to four new tires in thirteen months.  No more problems - right?

In June the second new tire (one I had bought in September!) developed a couple of weird bulges. They said it was defective. It was replaced  with yet another new one.  So now I had four new tires (again!). 

Today I was ahead of schedule running errands before opening the shop.  My last stop was the hardware store.  When I exited the store I noticed I had a flat.  How novel!  Luckily, the flat was on the driver side so I discovered it before making it out into traffic.  And the pouring rain stopped just as roadside assistance arrived.  The kind gentleman was able to inflate my spare and when he pulled off the flat tire, he showed me the large screw embedded between the treads.  I must have picked it up in the hardware store parking lot.

 

September 2016

I sincerely hope that today's flat marks the end of my tire woes.  Six trips (well, seven including my upcoming visit on Monday to have this tire repaired or replaced) in less than a year and a half is making me sick and tired of tires.

Four Cat Stories

One of the countless benefits of being known as a cat lover is the abundance of cat tales that people share with me.  Here are four of my favorites.

A woman who stopped by our booth at Music is Art told me two great cat stories.  The first was about her aloof kitty named Snowbell.  She liked to keep a bell on his collar and over the years he had managed to ditch every single one.  But she stubbornly continued to buy new bells for him.  She ran a day care in her house and one day a child came up to her and said, “That cat hates bells.”  She immediately removed the bell from the collar and the word “bell” from his name.  Snow transformed into a friendly, playful, and snuggly kitty for the rest of his life – and when she replaced her old refrigerator she discovered almost a dozen dusty bells on the floor.

The second story she told me involved Snow’s brother.  I cannot remember his original name but he was almost as reserved as his brother and a troublemaker to boot.  She kept a framed photo of her late husband Gus on the mantle and almost every day this cat would leap onto the mantle and knock the photo onto the floor.  One day she caught him approaching the frame, ready to swat it down.  In her anger she yelled out her husband’s name instead of the cat’s name. “Gus!  Stop that!”  The cat stopped immediately, jumped down, ran over to her and kissed her on the cheek.  He never messed with the photo again and she changed his name to Gus (apparently with her late husband’s blessings).  Gus the cat never messed with the photograph again.

Two of my favorite cat stories came to me from one of my dearest customers at the shop.  Beverly Goldsman was a brilliant and meticulous collage artist and a whimsical storyteller.  She loved to tell stories about her quirky kitty, the inimitable Theodore Roosevelt Goldsman – Theo. 

Theo

Theo was an indoor/outdoor cat with friends all over the neighborhood.  Then he went missing.  A search was launched, but after a week there had been no sign of him.  The whole family was upset, but Beverly’s teenage daughter was especially distraught.  One day she stayed home from school because she was so distressed and her worried mother stayed home to be by her side.

 

As she was comforting her daughter, an unusual vision popped into Beverly’s head - a local street sign at a nearby intersection, by the bus stop bench.  With no explanation to her daughter, she grabbed her car keys and dashed out the door.  She drove to the intersection and there on the bench sat Theo.  She opened up the passenger door and he hopped right into the car as if  he had done it many times before.  If her daughter had been astonished to see her mother rush pell-mell out the door, she was even more amazed when Beverly returned with a very smug Theo.

 

On another occasion, Beverly and her family had been away on vacation for over a week.  A neighborhood girl had been in charge of feeding and caring for Theo.  On the day of their return, Beverly could hardly wait to see her beloved kitty but he was nowhere to be found inside the house.  She went across the street to speak with the teenage caretaker who told her Theo had been seen only that morning.  So Beverly set out down the street to locate him, calling his name.  About a block away from home, she spotted him halfway down the next block.  He saw her and began running towards her, as she ran towards him (yes, just like that old commercial).

When he was about ten feet away from Beverly, Theo suddenly remembered that he was angry at her for abandoning him for so long and he skidded to an abrupt halt, turned slowly around, and sat down with his back to her.  She told me it was like watching a cat in a cartoon.

To quote cartoonist B. Kliban, “Mysterious little creatures, aren’t they?”

Waiting for the cat to die

When I was a kid, swinging as high as I could go on my rope swing attached to the tree in the back yard, I would pump and pump until I could go no higher.  Then I would stop pumping and let the swing go back and forth, back and forth, in ever decreasing arcs, until it ever so slowly came to a stop.  We called this waiting for the cat to die*.

I had not thought of this phrase for many years until the last few days, nursing my old cat Dermot through his final days.  In May of 2015 the vet had diagnosed a hard cancerous tumor growing on his jaw.  The tumor was too invasive for any surgery; it would just grow back.  So we watched and waited, making sure he was not suffering.  The tumor began the size of a pea, progressed to the size of a peanut, then a walnut, then a lemon – it was unstoppable – but so was Dermot.

His behavior never changed.  He ate and slept and lounged out on the catio watching the birds in the sunlight and moths in the moonlight.  He had always been the cat who walked by himself, barely paying attention to any feline housemates.  He enjoyed a simple life – he came to me once in a while for scritches and showed up for every meal on time.  Sometimes in the morning I’d find him sleeping next to me.

Dermot (long-haired gray and white tuxedo) and his sister Siobhan (black and white short-haired cow cat) were born in a little farm house out in South Wales, across from my friends’ magical farm called Rivendell.  Their mother was also a long-haired tuxedo, as was their suspected father.  The farm house was full of cats and huge enthusiastic dogs with chickens pecking and clucking out on the lawn and a phalanx of militant geese guarding the perimeter.

 

The kittens sang the song of their people in the car all the way home, won over the border guards with their infinite cuteness, and settled into their new digs nicely.  Dermot was instantly friendly to me while Siobhan acted like I was torturing her every time I tried to pet her.  It took her almost three years before she transformed overnight into a complete cuddlebug.  They played together as kittens and then completely ignored each other as they grew older.

Dermot acquired many nicknames in his lifetime – Dermie Diamond Nose, Mister D, Big D, Big Fuzzy D, Dermie Doodle, Doodlebug, and my favorite – Fuzzy Butt.  His coat was magnificent, his toehawks were adorable, his tail was glorious (well, except for the time he got an abscess on the base of it and lost about two inches of fur so it ended up looking like a bottle brush - but I promised him I would not post any embarrassing photos on the Internet).  He groomed himself religiously.  He also left a trail of fine gray hairs wherever he went.  I expect I will be finding fluffy traces of him for many years to come.

My house is filled with kitty houses and cat beds and Dermot loved them all.  But his favorite places to sleep were inside cupboards – stashing away  laundry was always a trial because he would leap onto a pile of clean jeans or towels.  He even figured out how to get into the cupboard under the kitchen sink to lounge amongst the paper towels, sponges and candles.  I finally had to install a baby lock to keep him out.  One day I discovered a sweatshirt on the closet floor - he had pulled it down off the hanger and made himself a cozy bed.  Talk about a hair shirt!

The Hair Shirt

In his prime he weighed over twelve pounds; on the day he was diagnosed he had dropped down to ten pounds.  We knew he would eventually have difficulty eating and this is exactly what happened.  We switched from kibble to canned paté and when he finally had trouble with the paté, in the last month or so, paté and water were blended into a soupy slurry. Chicken and beef baby food, as well as a liquid supplement, were added to his menu.  Every time I came up with a new meal he could more easily consume he expressed great delight.  He never failed to show up on the bathroom counter for his meals.  But his fur was becoming matted and dry, and his weight continued to drop.  His once-magnificent ruff became scraggly and nearly disappeared.  He was practically a short-haired cat by the end.  And, as he had done for nearly fifteen years, he steadfastly refused to allow any attempts at grooming.

Until his last few days his behavior was completely normal.  One of his cutest tricks was to come to me and “sharpen” his claws on my pants leg – but he never unsheathed his claws while doing this – just huge soft paws going through the motions.  A truly gentle soul. He slept a lot, usually sprawled on the cool tile floor in the kitchen doorway and I had to be ever vigilant not to step on him or trip over him.  I still find myself watching out for him in that spot. It seems so odd that he is not there anymore.

The cool tile floor

It got to the point where I found myself expecting to find him dead on the floor in the mornings when I woke up or in the evenings when I returned from the shop.  I so hoped he could just slip away painlessly.  It was taking him longer and longer to consume lesser and lesser amounts of any kind of food.

Wednesday the 27^th of July was a bad day for Facebook cats.  In one of my many cat groups a woman posted about the unexpected passing of her kitty Sweep and another member of the group responded by posting a poem for her, to cushion her sorrow.  I was at the shop, worrying about Dermot and looking for signs when I read this poem, called "May I Go Now?" by Susan A. Jackson.   Tears filled my eyes as I read this – it seemed to be Dermot speaking directly to me.  It was a sign. I phoned my vet, made that awful final appointment for my Doodlebug, and prepared to close up early.  Then another lady posted about the loss of her kitty Odessa.  Another sign.  I rushed home.

Dermot did not sing the song of his people during the short trip to the vet’s office, but he did murmur a few soft notes.  The exam room was ready with a soft fleece blanket on the stainless steel table and a tech gave him an injection of a sleeping potion.  He did not protest, just kind of sighed and curled into a ball.  I kept crooning to him, kissing him on his head, stroking his still-soft fur and offering reassurances. By the time the vet came in, he agreed that Dermot’s time had indeed come to leave our world.  My once-magnificent boy was gone to the Rainbow Bridge before the needle was removed from his leg.  He was at peace.

Dermot swung through his life in high arcs until one day he lost his momentum and finally began to slow at first imperceptibly and then more visibly.  He lived his life as he always had, enjoying the little things that a cat enjoys – sunlight and moonlight, soft beds and cool floors, a new cardboard box and plenty of food.  Rest in peace, dear lad.

Nothing beats a nice new box!

* The poem, Waitin' Fer The Cat to Die, was written by Hoosier poet James Whitcome  Riley, an old family favorite for his book "Rhymes of Childhood", which included one of his most famous poems Little Orfant Annie.