Viola Fertilizer

Last Thursday I turned my viola, Mary Lou, into fertilizer.  Charles Liu took her for one of his half-size cellos.  It felt a little like trading in a Michael Jordan basketball card for a John Stockton.  I liked my viola, but I didn’t play her.  I play the mandolin more than the viola, the banjo more than the mandolin, and my $150.00 little starter-violin more than all four.  I traded for Stockton over Jordan because, on my team, Jordan was riding the pine.

One day last winter while Ember was visiting Evan in the hospital I took the viola into Peter Prier and Son’s to have it assessed.  The Prier violin shop is different than the Liu shop.  Prier’s son, who is roughly my age, was running the potential trade-in.  He reminded me of myself when I (the teacher) bid a construction job like some bratty heir to the throne who expects everything and deserves nothing.  He likes to appeal to authority.  I like his father and always thought it was funny that he called machine-made instruments fly-swatters.  His father’s movie that I watched at the Suzuki Institute Camp, when I was a boy, convinced me that violins, unlike men, are not created equally!  The son then told me he is giving me a better deal on the trade-in than his father would if he were there.

“The broken tip of your bow makes it practically worthless.” 

I fiddle on my violin with the “worthless” bow almost every day.  The hair is thin, and the tip is “broken,” but somehow I’m able to jam on scores of tunes with the worthless thing.  Why does he tell me he’ll give me just over a hundred dollars trade-in on what should otherwise be thrown in the garbage? 

“As I said, my dad wouldn’t take this in on trade…I’m doing you a real favor.”

The way he talks to me I don’t feel like I’ve had any favors bestowed.  So far no one has played or listened to the instrument.  I produce an original receipt and Prince Prier informs the company that the instrument, in three more years, twenty in all, becomes an antique.  He then asks if he can make a copy of the receipt. 

I’m left alone with the kids.  Nancy has been in love with the desk’s bell.  She figured out that she can roll the stroller up to the desk, stand up in the seat and ring.  She had pushed the heir apparent over the edge and he condescendingly told her to stop while he was taking a call.  Nancy doesn’t like condescending, nor does she like “no”.  He was talking to a customer on the phone with high-brow tag-lines about how one gets what they pay for. 

“We only sell the very best instruments so the prices reflect….”

He doesn’t breath any life into the lines and they seem as hollow as the insides of a violin without a sound-post.  If the instruments are such quality then why take a worthless bow on trade-in?  When he comes back with the copy of the receipt he looks over the body of the instrument like a doctor’s assistant giving a physical.  He docks the price with every scratch.  Ironically, the instrument’s sound isn’t inhibited by any of the scratches.  No one has even tried to play her! 

“It will take the maker hours to repair these scratches.  Each hour is valued at….”

So, starting at the original purchase price of $3,574.87, he subtracts all of the scratches, ads in the value of the bow, and comes up with the exchange balance of $2,748.50.  When I bought the instrument, soon after she was born, I was told that hand-made instruments were assets.  The new wine just needed a little time to ferment.

“Instruments are one of the only investments that appreciate with time.  If you buy a new car, it loses thousands of dollars, in value, when you pull it off of the lot.  Instruments become more valuable with time.”

I was in my sixteenth year when I bought it and put much more time into earning money for the instrument than I did practicing.  Due at the first of every month was a hundred dollar payment to State Bank.  All of the money I didn’t spend on gasoline, dates, track trips, clothes, running-shoes, and more gasoline (often we staved the gaslight off with change from the ashtray).  Between the interest and principal I shelled out between five and six thousand dollars for that instrument.  If I earned the money at eight-dollars an hour, which is what I roughly remember that Dad paid, it took around seven hundred hours of work.  If I were to cram those working weekends, evenings, and summers into forty-hour work-weeks it would still take over four months of my young life to garner that much money.  I worked for the bank more than I worked with the instrument like a plumber’s apprentice marrying a trophy wife.  She looks good on his arm, but he works so hard to keep her that he doesn’t have any time to spend with her.

Why didn’t I practice the viola more?  It isn’t the instrument that I most effectively use to mine the music inside.  Chris Thile says that the mandolin is incidentally the instrument that he uses to sing his soul’s song.  As a Suzuki student my first instrument was my ear.  I used it to play the violin, but when I bought a clock radio at K-Mart I listened to other emerging voices.  I remember listening to Michael Jackson and trying to express what I felt inside by skidding across my carpet in an awkward moonwalk.  After the clock radio I wore out a tape player on B.J. Thomas, several Ray Stevens tapes, and a pirated copy of the Forest Gump soundtrack.  Long after CDs came out I graduated to a JVC six-changer CD player.  Paul Simon, Dire Straits, Led Zeplin, Stephen Wolf, R.E.M., C.C.R, John Denver, Tom Petty, Cat Stevens and others like Bread, The Beetles, Blood Sweat and Tears, Eric Claptan, Collective Soul, Jethro Tull, and Queen played over and over along with a Teleman Viola Concerto, Beethoven’s Fifth, and my EFY and seminary soundtracks.  I sang along.  John Fogerty is impossible to imitate.  Paul Simon’s voice is chocolate covered.  Robert Plant haunts me when awake or asleep.  On Sundays I’d sing in the ward youth choir, ward choir, and, when they were going, the stake youth choir.  But I didn’t rigorously practice scales, techniques, new songs, and theory on my instrument.  At my lessons Sara would sight-read while I copied in real-time what she played.  During the week I didn’t feel a need to practice.  Sara did it for me, right?  When I sang or played the viola it was in orchestra class, in choir class, or at quartet rehearsals.  Practice doesn’t make sense when the rock-and-roll side raged like Hyde.  My classical “Jekyll” withered. 

There is so much that this master violin maker’s son won’t know and can’t be told.  If I bear my soul about how hard I’ve worked to earn the money to pay for this instrument then I’m sure I’ll be encouraged to keep it.  I also pine over what mom will think.  She spent so much time with me at the piano while I bowed on first, the violin and then, at twelve years old, the viola.  I realize now that I can’t keep the instrument just because I have invested money into it.  It has to die so that another instrument can live for David.

David constantly asks for a cello.  Ever since Cello-Jedi Steven Sharp Nelson used the force on him in the “Cello Wars” video David hasn’t wavered.  “I’m learning the piano so I can play the cello.”  Maybe he should pay for the instrument, but I’d rather him earn his relationship with it.

Prier’s son is back.  I’m so pleasant when I ask, “Why didn’t the instrument’s value rise with time?”

His explanation of why this instrument is more like a car than a Stradivarius is simply this:  If you pay over $10,000.00 then your instrument will appreciate.  Instruments purchased for $9,999.99 and under are basically nothing more than a wooden Buick, Volkswagen, or Acura.  I’m such a pushover.  I bought the heater-less Acura in Logan for roughly three grand.  The funny thing is that I thought it was also a good investment because, though it was also about twenty years old, it was a Honda product, right?  According to the Consumer Report, Hondas retain their value so well they practically appreciate!  All I can say is that the Acura was a lemon.  The heating core and wiring that it needed to have replaced would have cost over a grand.  We soaked another two grand into a cracked seal somewhere.  It was an act of mercy that the money-pit threw a rod a few months after getting “fixed”.  The loss was total and the Acura brought a hundred dollars on the tow-away market.  At least the viola isn’t totaled!

Back in the Prier shop, I’m now asking to have David O. sized to an instrument within our price-range.  After a stiff brow-beating lecture about why Priers don’t carry instruments as cheap as anywhere else in town; he breaks it to me:

“Our entry level cellos are the price of the trade-in ‘value’ of the viola!” 

I’m seething, but I can’t leave without going the distance.  Who brings four kids into this vortex twice?  Time is short, we have imposed upon the famished Prier, he tells me he is a diabetic and hasn’t eaten lunch yet.  Thankfully, he has to cut things short so he can go to the backroom and eat his, now cold, Chinese takeout.  After we size a cello to fit David O. I pack up the viola, the four kids, and a worthless bow, and walk out the threshold with no intention of returning.

The Peter Paul Prier experience was in the winter, now it’s summer and I find myself in another violin shop, Charles Liu’s.  Tonight Steve Barfuss hosts his first in-home jam session and we want to arrive at six-thirty.  We walked into the shop at a little after five so we have just under an hour before they close.  It shouldn’t take too long, right?  I have two children, David O. and Jenna.  Jenna camps out at the Tootsie Roll barrel and David looks around at hundreds of instruments wondering which cello is his.  When we tell the man behind the desk our intentions he offers to play the viola before he even mentions scratches.  I left the bow at home so he has to go find one in the shop.  The maker comes in and the two of them banter back and forth about the “brightness” of the instrument while the clerk continually plays “Meditation.”  The scene between the two men reminds me of Tevia and the fiddler exchanging looks and dance moves as they exit the stage.

The maker takes the instrument and asks me, “What do you expect to get for the viola?”

Oh, if I were Johnny Lingo I’d drive a hard bargain.  I want to give him a sales job, but I have nowhere to stand upon except the truth.

“I paid around three-thousand for it and realize it has a few scratches.  My wife and I thought that if we were to put it on KSL we’d probably ask two thousand dollars.”

I’m almost shocked to see him agreeing with everything I said.  Dang, I underestimated. 

“This is a student-made viola which doesn’t appreciate in value.  You couldn’t get any more than that for it.”  His Asian matter-of-factness is spoken directly at the Viola, not me.  He is holding it like so many depictions of Hamlet speaking to an old skull.

I don’t want to aggressively barter.  I ask him how much the half-sized cellos are.

“They are Fifteen hundred ninety-five, but I won’t give you cash for any more than that.”

I calculate the lost four hundred dollars and figure that I’d rather work with this shop than the other one, and so I agree.

“Can we look at cellos?”

David O. responds to each of the cellos: “I like that one” as if he’s made up his mind.  The first time they’re all played he chooses based on looks.  The second time he notices differences in tone.  The clerk, whose name is David, keeps smirking at David O’s decided indecisiveness.  He sees this as an opportunity to get a commission, not help a child discover.  D.O. declared his love for a different instrument again and the kid behind the cello seems to give up on us.  He now sets his will on a goal he can accomplish: deciding for himself which cello he prefers.

Jennilyn, who had been up for The Spencer Family Reunion, is attending the jam session tonight so I call her as she makes her way through rush-hour traffic to come try out the cellos.  The Family Reunion started on Monday which doubled as the day that Ember flew back from Lyle’s four-day wedding celebration in Pittsburgh.  The wedding took a few minutes on Sunday, but their family made the trip into a vacation.  Being home alone with the kids took me to such an uncomfortable limit that I still haven’t decided if I’m going to write about it in depth.  It was the closest thing to becoming a nursing-mother of five children I’ve ever experienced and it scared the begebers out of me!  After day one I was curled up into the fetal position crying for mercy.  My new theory is that the next frontier of reality T.V. is some kind of a Mrs. Doubtfire contest with five children under the age of eight including a six-month old bottle-fed baby that’s hooked up to oxygen and monitors.  Mothering can’t be easy for women and it’s bone-chilling-scary to me.

Jenni arrives and all four of us decide on one cello.  I ask David, the Clerk, if Liu will throw in a hard-case with the viola trade.  

When he comes back he says, “He’ll reduce the price of the hard-case to a hundred-fifty instead of two-hundred.”

I call Em and we decide to put it on a card. 

When we start walking out of the shop I remember my viola case.  I traded him the viola, not the case.  I recall the conversation that Prince Prier and David O. had months before where the former told the latter that used cases were practically worthless.

“I’ll take the case since it’s practically worthless to you, right?”

“Actually, it isn’t, but you can take it if you want.”

He hoists the fertilizer from the case and runs it to the back room.  I zip up the empty case and throw it over my shoulder.  I shake hands with him on my way out and make some joke about getting overtime as I see the clock now cuts into his personal life.  Either he respects himself too much to laugh or he worries that I’ll be back with the clan (Jenni brought all three of her kids to the shop and the Tootsie-Roll barrel is now half gone) to work out any one of one hundred different things that go wrong with student instruments.  

That night after the Jam, Jenni asks if I have buyer’s remorse. 

“Yes and no.  Why do you ask?”

“Oh, you seemed pretty set on getting your case back.”

Yes, I’ll use the case for the mandolin or maybe my violin.  One part of me wanted to keep the viola forever, but as the late Ephraim Levi once said, “[Violas] are like manure.  They aren’t worth a darn thing unless they’re spread around encouraging young things to grow!”

Your band doesn't have a permanent name?

Thursday May 30th is a "Free Dress" day at Paradigm because it's essentially the last day of the school-year.  It's the day we all play sports or compete in games ranging from a 5K run, to Pokemon, chess, geek trivia, and an Essay writing contests.  I am placed over Basketball with Steve Barfuss.

After playing several games of basketball I reek like a Hot-Shot firefighter.  With my new fumed identity I only feel comfortable around my own sweaty kind.  The school is holding the Paradigm Olympics today to burn up an otherwise worthless day.  The school is fairly diverse, but basketball is going through a dark age.  Volleyball is wildly popular.  I wonder if it's because they get the air-conditioned gym while basketball is relegated outside on the blacktop with the most unforgiving rims since the Oak City Days Three on Three Tournament.  

Basketball is fun, but ever since I woke up I've been thinking about the evening gig that Steve Barfuss and I will be playing.  Maybe if I lived the golden rule better I wouldn't be going to the gig.  David has a piano recital at the same time as the benefit concert.  Honestly, I don't know which I knew about first, but it didn't matter because they didn't conflict until the benefit concert was rescheduled on the same night as David's performance.  I'm not sure I want to pray over whether I should do one or the other for fear that I already know the answer.  I try and internally tell myself that it's for a good cause, but it all sounds like an excuse.  When I talk to Em about it I offer to take Jenna and Nancy so she only has to worry about Evan and Emeline.  

"Who is going to watch the girls while you're playing."  

I must really want to do this gig because I've already thought this through.  "Steve said he'll bring his eight-year-old and she can hang-out with the girls during the performance."  

It was true and I could see that Em was making sure I was committed to number one: baby-sitting and number two: performing.  

After the Paradigm Olympics, Steve and I practice the sets we'll play and I leave out a verse of "I am a Man of Constant Sorrow" for brevity's sake.  With our other favorite song, "Ain't no Grave", we are both treading less familiar waters--him on banjo and me on cello; I never get all of the words exactly right, but we like it so it is our planned finale.  The songs in-between feel as much a part of us as "I Am a Child of God" to a Primary chorister.  We jam together twice every week.  We've got this.

After school I have several things to do before I can go home and pick up the girls.  First on the list is signing a new contract for next year's salary.  I've tried to get out of this with both Scott and Troy.  

"Hey do I need to meet with you guys or can I just sign something?"  

Both have told me they want to meet.  This is literally the third time we've rescheduled.  I honestly don't like these meetings and yet they aren't all bad.  After the door is closed they just kind of watch.  I feel like I'm the prey and they're the big game hunter on Jumanji chasing after Alan Perish, played by Robyn Williams.  The last time I watched that movie I realized the hunter, Jonathan Hyde, plays both Alan's father and Van Pelt, the hunter.  He's always getting after Alan for being the bed-wetting little boy who can't stand up for himself.  Scott, Troy, and Chris watch me squirm in my chair.  I wish there were somewhere to put my long arms.

My employers have been like Jekyll to me of late, but Hyde exists too.  They are thorough so when in question they want you to give them your entire side of any issue.  If they agree with you then you get Jekyll, but if not then Hyde.  After the first semester of this year, in the middle of January, they called me in.  

I had instituted democracy in my classes according to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School with myself as an equal voting member of the mob.  It went south like Wallace's "Wrong Trousers".  The students could vote on what they wanted, which they did.  In my Newspaper class they gave themselves a daily snack-time.  The World-sports class used their suffrage to institute  a dunce-cap law.  An arbitrary conviction and confirmation from a majority of the class could send a "violator" to the corner for five minutes with a dunce-cap.  I'm sure the evening news would have loved to get hold of that.  As it turned out, the Newspaper class elected a new president every month.  It seemed like a good idea, but it created factions.  Each faction following its own former class president.  In the end the class was torn into at least six groups and each seemed to cry out, like so many of Cesar's bloody piercings, trying to name their own new tyrant.  The World Sports class, mostly due to daily exercise in the gym, never really took the dunce-cap law too seriously.  When the administration called me into "the office", last January, they thought that the problem was the gym.  Ironically the newspaper class was the problem, but they weren't even using the gym.  

"Steve" one of them said, "How did things go last semester...well, the reason we wanted to bring you in here was to let you know that we think it would be better if you didn't have the gym anymore."  

I had just watched a TEd video that talked about how alphas, male or female, use power-poses to one-up the competition.  I nonchalantly struck a subtle power-pose and tried to explain the gym was helping not hurting my classes.  In the end I predicted the Spring semester wouldn't turn into Lord of the Flies.  

Now, at the end of the Spring Semester, I sat in "the office" and we talked about the year.  Of course "The Democracy" comes up.  I can't believe what I was hearing.

  

"That was awesome to let your students experience complete democracy."  

We talk about how at least three of the students in the Newspaper class have been suspended for drugs and others are raising Cain in various classes.  I don't enjoy contract meetings, but I can't say it wasn't entertaining.

On the way home I go into Walmart to pick up some flowers so David can give them to his teacher at the recital.  Before I grab the flowers I see that bananas are on sale for thirty-three cents a pound.  I don't have a cart, I'm here for flowers, so I grab as many as fit in my arms.  I know that I saved money not getting a cart, but as I'm hunched over trying to wedge the flowers into my banana pouch a young mother who might as well have been one of my sisters, pregnant, I think, asks, 

"Do you need any help?"  

"No, thank you".  Is what I say, but I'm thinking, can't you see how competent I am?  Are you questioning my abilities here, sister?

After Walmart and filling up the car at the Chevron I get a call from Em.  

"Where are you at?"

"I'm at the Chevron and I'll be home in a few minutes."

"Were you able to get the flowers?"

"Yup"

"We'll need to meet somewhere so I can get those from you."

We meet at the roundabout and I exchange Jenna and Nancy for the flowers.  Hardly a fair trade.  We go home and I scrub the basketball sweat off.  While I'm in the bathroom I can hear Nancy crying outside the door.  

"We aren't going to get a treat.  Why did we go with daddy?"  

I can't just drop my gig at this point so I tell her that treats have been a part of the plan from the beginning.  

"Why did you say we weren't going to get a treat?"  

I'm having a hard time remembering, but I think I said something about that between the roundabout and home.  I was hoping to under-sale and over-perform, but she forced my hand with this melt-down.

On the way to the concert we are delayed for twenty minutes in road construction.  The directions I had for the school were spurious so instead of arriving twenty minutes early we are twenty minutes late for a sound check.  I start to wonder if the fates are subverting this performance.  I can't let that distract me, but when I walk into the auditorium I get really nervous.  I'm feeling like Guy Patterson in That Thing You Do in the scene where he psyches himself out at his first spotlight performance and tips and crashes hi-hat to the floor.  Is this cave of an auditorium my over-sized coffin?

To get here, Steve has been walking me through driving directions on the phone like an air-traffic-control tower bringing in a plane on a stormy night.  Maybe I should have looked Copper Hills High up on Mapquest before I left?  I ask him what song he wants to use for the sound-check.  He wants to do our best song, "Constant Sorrow", but I want to save that card for the performance.  I suggest "Home with the Girls in the Morning".  He consents, but then when I vacillate to do "Constant Sorrow" he seems relieved.  Steve wears a beard, long hair, plays lead guitar, and argues about theoretical books and ideas to the death, but he's really a laid-back guy.  

A year ago I helped him remodel his Copperton house.  Daily he reminded me of working with our artistic-music-loving-cousin Jethro Gillespie.  Steve and I seemed to worry more about which Pandora Radio station we were tuned to than working on the house.  We're both dilettantes, but he defers to me because I brag about growing up in a family that remodeled houses for a living.  As a teacher I'm afraid I like to talk about the theory behind work more than working.  However after tearing out flooring, walls, ceilings, load-bearing walls, and closets (complete with the previous owner's pornographic skeletons) we put theory away.  We spent many nights, after work: framing new walls, adding a new archway, laying tile, hanging drywall, mudding and taping, and transitioning the old into new. 

After we play through our warm-up I'm feeling better and worse.  It's only when I both sing and chop the chords that the nervousness leaves.  The violin is a relationship in continual progress and regress.  I find when I play a new tune in public it goes wrong.  A public jam is like a Nietzschean silver hammer destroying imperfections and exposing flaws.  When I've played in church it seems to always go wrong because there isn't an informal public jam where "Joseph Smith's First Prayer" or "How Great Thou Art" fit.  I usually look back on performing in church as a bad experience, because that's where I've killed a lot of songs that would have been resurrected with merely one or maybe seven more performances.  Maybe I could take a schmaltzy version of an L.D.S. hymn to a jam, but even in Utah that isn't something that you get away with twice.  I can hear it now, "What do you want us to play? We thought we were getting away from church at this bar!"  Gospel songs are close enough to blues and folk tunes that some of the new-grass bands like Crooked Still have a heyday with "Wading Deep Waters", "Pharoah", and. "Calvary".  The public performance does one thing the metronome-driven-private-practice-session doesn't, it makes you exercise grace under new levels of pressure.  After playing nervous a few times the shakes become part of the performance; the nervous feelings seem to bring out something extra in the juggling-act between singing lyrics and  and bowing chords.  

After our warm-up two high-school-aged-guitarists come over and engage us in dialogue.  The one who plays chords like they were a Jimi Hendrix solo is appalled to hear we make up a new band-name every time we do a gig.  

"You don't really care if you get recognition?"  

Doesn't he know that Steve is old enough for a mid-life crisis?  What's in a name?  Tonight, when I was stopped in the traffic, Steve asked what I thought our band's name should be.  I told him that we haven't had any harsh critics call our prospects a "Lead Zeppelin", as in a blimp made entirely of metal.  The worst thing we've had said to our face is the student that tried to stop us in the middle of a tune two weeks ago and asked, "Why are you doing this?"  I suggested we call ourselves "Wiggly Dander" after a line in a poem Steve wrote a few months ago with his students.  The phrase was meant to refer to a head of disheveled hair, but it also might be mistaken for an innuendo so tonight Steve told the powers that be that "Southwind", a song we haven't played in months and doesn't seem to fit like "Wiggly Dander", is our name.  Giving animals, homes, and children a new name always dumbfounds me.  The children name the chickens: Dark Disorien, Cloudy, White, Skittles, Fawny, Olivia, Cheep, and Shy.  We call our former homes after the city they're in or after the child that was born there.  We called our first son, "The Baby" for a few days before we settled on David.  Jenna was easy because Em always knew what she'd name her first baby girl.  Nancy was easier than David, but it took a while.  Emeline was Emmaline on the first-draft of her birth-certificate.  Evan's name on all of his hospital documentation was "Baby Fife".  Maybe having more of an obsession with a name would transform the nameless bands I've played into heroic legends, but maybe I'd start to believe it mattered more than knowing how to play?

Steve was given the cue for our performance, "You'll go after the second 'Slam Poet'".  Originally we were supposed to play for a half-hour block, but another Steve, the student-adviser, who invited us to play, informs us tonight that a bunch of students signed up at the last minute.  We are essentially performing at a high school talent-show.  That takes the jitters out a little bit, but then the first Slam Poet takes the stage after some student performances and he is good.  My hands clam up so I open them and rest them on my shirt-sleeves so the sweat can soak directly into the fabric.  Jenna and Nancy have been doing well up to this point.  Both girls are laughing at Slam Poet number one.  Jenna comes up to me after a few more performances and tells me that Nancy pried a wad of chewing gum off of the seats and is chomping away like Violet Beauregarde.  I don't know why, but STDs infecting her little body cloud my mind and I almost leap over to make her spit out the unspeakable filth.  Nancy at first is shocked that I would deprive her of a hard-earned joy.  After the shock wears off she buries her face in the folding seat and turns into a weepy ostrich.  I go back to my seat and try to watch the concert.  After she realizes I'm not going to go over to her she moans back and forth in the empty row in front of us.  She crosses in front of us half a dozen times before she comes and sits on my lap and tells me how emotionally tied she was to the gum.  After resolving this drama, the second Slam Poet leaves the stage and the "dead-air" is our responsibility.  The MC announces us two or three times as a joke while we amble on stage.  His joke feels more like annoyance with these two dads that have somehow made it onto the program.  I'm sure he's wondering, "Did that one just come on stage with a four-year-old?"

Unpeeling the cello and unbuckling the violin add to the dead-air time.  They say that seven seconds of dead-air will kill a radio show.  We go on the stage. The audience is silent.  Steve starts into "Constant Sorrow" and I wonder if anything will come out when I open my mouth.  It does.  I add the verse that I left out in practice which confuses Steven and we end without the final verse.  Our second number is a set of two reels: Caribou and Catharsis.  The first tune could have been written for a nature film on reindeer games.  Tonight, the transition between the two reels feels smooth.  Up to this point...no hiccups.   Four measures into Catharsis Steve stumbles.  Steve never stumbles like this.  We've been playing together for almost two years so I recognize when he's lost and he knows when I miss a repeat.  He is the glue that holds my wanderings in a straight course, but he isn't lost.  Something is wrong.  To me, it sounded like he'd lost a pick.  It's confirmed when I hear his fingernails barely able to eek out half of the sound the lost pick commanded.  We stop.  Steve inverts his guitar and starts shaking it like a baby trying to get the rice out of its rattle.  I announce: "Lost a pick in the guitar".  The young guitarist, the same one who worried about our name changes sprints at the stage holding up a pick like he is Prometheus with his stolen torch from the gods determined to light the Olympic Flame.  Steve's light is rekindled from Prometheus and we finish our Catharsis.  

The only other thing worthy of note in this performance is our encounter with our two new instruments.  In some ways I feel like an impostor playing the cello.  Steve isn't on his principal instrument either when he dawns the banjo, but we love "Ain't no Grave" enough to risk posing.  When I started grooving on the cello the banjo doesn't mesh, at first, so I keep playing the intro.  I play at least ten measures of intro and it still doesn't jive.  Then I stopped and confessed to the audience, 

"This is the first time I've played the cello in public."  

We start again but now the lyrics don't come.  The silver hammer rains its blows on my brain.  Finally, I started into the lyrics and we bounce our way through.  The song feels dead as I ironically shout out, "Ain't no grave" not even the one that I've willingly climbed into as I speak "gonna hold this body down."

During the performance Nancy had been peeking around the curtains.  I don't know exactly where Jenna is, but she is with Steve's daughter Tallia.  Nancy jumps out when I put my instruments away, but when we squeeze out the back door she has disappeared.  I thought she went on stage during the next Slam Poet and back into the audience, but when I look she isn't there.  I can't go in through the back so I have to walk past the M.C. into the curtains.  There she is.  

"Daddy, I have to go potty."  

I take her out the back and find Jenna before sending them to the bathroom, together.  I then go back into the auditorium to get my instruments.  They weren't in the bathroom long enough to be done, were they?  They don't respond when I call into the restroom.  I call again.  

"Nancy!"  "Jenna!"  

I start to pray,  "Father please help me find those girls."

As I pray I worry about pedophiles.  We had a sex-offender that lived across the street from us in North Ogden.  The fear of abductors throws me back into constant vigilance of the kids on that cul-de-sac.  Then the Sunday morning we called 911 because we couldn't find Jenna for over twenty minutes in Riverton flooded back.  She had thought we were going to church and was eventually found at church walking out of a random Sacrament Meeting.  I felt like a baby as I held Jenna and wept in front of the responding police officer.  I abandon the instruments in the car and mentally prepare to fight for my daughter's lives.  It isn't necessary. Nancy runs up to me when I walk in the doors.  Time to go.

Nancy insists we race to the car.  At Arctic Circle, the girls order ice cream cones and tater tots.  I'm glad when the food comes because the play-place smells like residue from dirty bodies.  In the car I ask Jenna if she noticed when Brother Barfuss lost his pick.  She and I laugh.  When we arrive home David is upset that I didn't go watch him so I remind him that we are going to the Demolition Derby together the next day.  Ironically, Em had also gone to Arctic Circle with the other three kids and David and Jenna compare their spoils.  When Em asks how it went I feel like the stories about playing are hollow and dead, but we laugh at the stories of the girls.  

I wonder if today marks another coming to pass of Don McLean's "day the music died".  Oh well, we failed.  The failure doesn't seem so tragic though when you own the power over the life and death of a song.  If a nameless band can kill a song then can it also bring it to life?  Awe, hang it all...the family is back together and alive!

What do we do without the internet part 2

The internet has been turned off from Netflix since that last letter.  The kids still fight though.  I set up a large rope in our garage that creates a lot of drama.  The rule is that as long as you're on it no one can take it away from you, but if you get off then it's free game.  That's why Jenna swung on it today for what David claims was over two hours.  The attic access is located in the garage and we had a large rope we made at a Riverton pack-meeting almost two years ago so, of course, I climbed up into the access, attached the rope to a rafter and dangled it down.  Their runway consists of the three steps that drop into the garage from the kitchen.  They know the steps could hurt them so they are careful not to whack their shins.  They're all developing strong core muscles.  

Yesterday I worked in the garage as they pendulummed back and forth all day long.  I framed together a lattice for Em's squash plants and two benches that will help surround the fire-pit.  The lumber was from the cull pile at Home Depot.  The store was as crowded as December 23rd.  Everyone else was blinded to the six 4"x4"x12's and the 2"x6"x4'.  The blueprints for what lumber I needed rested in my brain like a craving for a favorite meal.  When I saw all of that lumber I knew it was heaven sent.  I had Kevin, the Home Depot guy, not our cousin, saw it up for me into the right dimensions.  When I said, "Can I cut these 4x4s into shorter lengths?"  He cut me off in the thought and said, "I can cut them for you."  I guess he could tell I'm a soft-school-teacher.  I'll bet he would have let dad, the hard-school-teacher, cut those sticks.  

The garage has been the perfect place to work.  Last week we were going to Oak City to side Dad Chamberlain's barn with long sheets of metal.  On the way we accidentally went down a different street and ran into Nancy Sloan's yard-sale.  She was retiring her husband's old shop, he was brought back to life by another neighbor a few months ago after he attempted suicide, the wire wheel and the drill press caught my attention.  After running around the block for some cash at the house, we came back and picked up a lathe, the drill press, a bench grinder, the wire wheel, a belt sander, a saws-all, a router, pegboards and hangers, a hand plane, a scroll saw, and other nick knacks like an electric staple gun, some metal files, and even a florescent-light ballast.  I don't need the tools to do lawn furniture, but I clamped two boards together and used the drill-press to pilot my screw-holes, both at the same time.  

Two benches and a little lattice shouldn't take all day, but I had all five kids to take care of.  At Home Depot while Kevin was cutting out the 4x4s David discovered the 2x6es tucked under the cart made a new seat.  Emmie also seemed to want the seat so when his might overpowered her right she came unglued and squirmed on the floor in a pile of sawdust.  "David, what is going on?  Figure that out with your sister."  Evan, soaked Home Depot in like it was his first time.  He wasn't bothered by the saw, dad rounding up his siblings, nor the stop and go of the cart.  Maybe all of it caught up to him at the end.  He started crying in the checkout.  He doesn't cry like most kids.  He seems to be holding it back as it slowly rolls out of the corners of his big blue eyes.  He's like the boy who is hurt while with the men and realizes for the first time he wants to be one of them, but can't cry.  

All day long I feed Evan every two to three hours.  It takes over 30 minutes to feed him so I feel like my bow is unstrung.  The kids are playing all day long.  Nancy has an old box that she has pounded in over a hundred sixteen-penny nails.  She calls it her mouse-trap and keeps talking about how all she needs is some cheese on tip of the nails for which some unsuspecting mouse will skewer itself.  The box/trap weighs at least five or six pounds.  I have to say that I prefer Nancy's hammering and Emeline's tic-tocking to the stationary zombies that watched Netflix hour after hour.  Come to think of it, I'd rather they fight about ropes and swings, new seats, and just about anything else which exercises their brains, hearts, spirits, and bodies for something worth fighting for.  Like a nest full of healthy baby birds cheapping at their mother for the next inch of their lives.

Em is out hunting for dresses with her Mom and sister.  She left before 10:00am and was hopeful to get back in the early afternoon.  When she called around 4:00pm she seems distressed because she feels bad that she isn't home yet.  I'm secretly elated because I'm working on her Mother's Day presents, but tell her as coolly as I can that she doesn't need to rush.  If I didn't have this project I would rather her here on my team.  At the end of a day of watching kids I realize I'm anything but a supermom.

There is a small bird, not much bigger than a hummingbird, in our front tree that has a nest.  I discovered it while feeding Evan.  I had to have the door open because it felt like winter with it closed.  Let the bugs come in, but don't let me prolong winter.  The mother bird brought food to the babies and they made so much racket that I thought it must have been coming from across the street.  However, when she left the begging stopped.  It makes me happy that we have a tree that birds want to use to raise their fledglings

What do we do without internet?

When I came home last night the internet was clearly not turned off.  When we moved to our current house we didn't have the internet for a couple of months.  Kindness, curiosity, and creativity were at an all-time peak.  After this golden age of no technology we've gone downhill.  For over a year I've complain about the kids plugging into the internet like a pack of wolves on the wrong side of well displayed fresh meat.  They are never satisfied with one episode or movie.  It's like eating cold cereal in the morning and then being hungry for breakfast.  I've tried to think of how it can be compatible with our desired family culture, but it seems to be more powerful than my yelling about how they need to keep their rooms clean or start pulling their weight with chores.  The internet was supposed to be turned off by Digis yesterday so this is the final binge before stopping until the beginning of July.  

We have put it off so long for several reasons.  Evan's premature birth allowed us to watch all three seasons of Avatar the Last Air Bender at least twice.  Since then they're between Busy-town Mysteries, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and My Little Pony.  My Little Pony dominates right now and out of loyalty to masculinity I feel it's my duty to oppose it.

We do have a plan for when the internet is finally turned off.  Ironically we found many of our plans online.  For each of the children Em has downloaded several learning APs onto the tablet so they can learn offline.  I've pulled off almost a dozen woodworking projects from Em's "Yard Page" on Pintrest and Em has lined up enough mail-order Netflix DVDs to last us/her the next two months.

I have the kids pause the Ponies long enough to ask them which of my projects they think I should start.  They vote for the wooden flower boxes   They scatter from the internet for the time being and I tell my wife that I'd rather just work on the boxes with her.  She agrees and we go out to my "lumber-yard" and pick out scrap 2x4s from the Barfuss remodel job.  The smell of those old boards reminds me of my dad and all of the times I've been on the wrong side of a skill saw from him.  The memory reeks of hard sweaty work in a trashy house on an empty stomach.  I spent several hours last Saturday organizing this lumber-yard and the ordered boards might have been done by my Grandpa Spencer's meticulous sorting and stacking of similar old, but useful things.  Most of the lumber, no, all of the lumber is second-hand.  We choose some slats from an old pallet and Em says, "Before we do this we should clean up the backyard.  

What she meant was the "yard" behind the fenced backyard.  We have trash that Em has been hankering to clean up since David's clubhouse was broken into and ruined by some older boys in the neighborhood that sort of commandeered it into their "club".  David seemed to take the cue as a compliment that he'd created something legitimate enough for them to take notice.  The clubhouse materials were moved inside the fence, but the spirit of it stayed outside the fence.  Maybe a clubhouse needs to have a real threat in order to hold any allurement to boys.  Now that it's inside the fence the girls play in it.  The mess wasn't visible from our back windows so I'd just changed the subject up until now.  The weeds covered a lot of the junk.  It was fun to clean up with Em.  We did most of the work, but the girls came out for free wheelbarrow rides.

Where is our son? Watching My Little Pony?  Yup.

Max's Beard

Yesterday, 22 April 2013, a bearded Max came into my room.  His beard was nicely trimmed and confident like his walk and smiling eyes.  The beard didn't have the holes and splotches like my own scrag that I feel ashamed to grow and hide behind.  Max, one of my freshmen students from four years ago, was nothing but trouble in my Euclidean Geometry class.  The day I caught him on the phone with his mother knots up my stomach.  I looked like the desperate first-year teachers we make fun of on films that are terrified that they'll be fired if they can't exercise more control over their student's lives.  I made the mistake of taking his phone and trying to talk to Max's mom.
"This is bull sh..!  You can't take my son't phone away when school is out in just a couple of minutes."
"I'm sorry mam, you'll have to pick up Max's phone in the office after school."
"I'm in a hurry, I don't have the time for this sh..!"
Max was using his mom to take a sucker punch at me and I felt like I'd lost some teeth.

Did the Beard, the well kept beard, the manly beard meant another facade max was hiding behind?  Men grow beards to hide behind.  I grew one four years ago before I interviewed with St. John's College.  I thought It'd give me a raw liberal artist look instead of my typical turtle waxed Mormon chin.  I tried to tell myself that I looked older with the beard, but that wasn't true.  It made me look younger, like the long peach fuzz grown by a seventeen-year-old Hasidic Jew.  It turned out that I wasn't accepted or rejected at St. John's because of my facial hair.  Fortunately they could see right past it.

Max didn't hide from me as I sat cloistered behind my desk admiring his beard out of the corner of my eye while I wrapped up another compelling conversation with a student I'll call Jan.  She was retelling some workplace horror stories that were making public school seem like paradise.  Max shakes my hand and I'm thinking that he is also taller than when he was in my class as a fifteen year old.  The formerly beardless youth who used his mom to punch me in the gut looks, stands, and shakes hands like a man.

"Oh, I've read that." He has noticed a copy of Emerson's Self-Reliance on my desk.
"Really?"  Is he just saying that to try and impress me?  What does he care about books?
"I read a lot these days.  My favorite author is a journalist, Christopher Hitchens.  He is brilliant.  My favorite work of his is called Letters to a Young Contrarian; he calls himself a liberal democrat.  He takes on Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa  religion, tradition, and anyone who doesn't agree with him.  One time he gave his arm to a Neo-Nazi who yelled hateful words in his face.  He appreciates free speech so much."

We talk about more of his heroes: Joseph Cambell, Bertrand Russel, C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, and his growing library.  He confesses, "I buy more books than I can read. I get them from Savers and other second-hand stores."  He is gushing.  "I have to write and read every day or I don't feel happy anymore."

Then he expresses his intention to bring all of his excitement for thinking to a halt, "I'm going to college now that my surgery is over."
"Why are you going to college if you're getting such a great education right now?"  I'm joking and serious.  "If you go to school then don't let it get in the way of your education."

Going to a community college would waste Max's time and energy.  If he goes to St. John's he'll be doing what he wants: read, write, and discuss on day one rather than waiting until all of his generals are done.  Hopefully, his geometry grade doesn't prevent him from going to the college of his choice.

On his way out the door I ask him to come back and discuss one of his favorite readings with one of my classes.  The label of "Max the boy" seems like ancient history.  He is all covered in the light and enthusiasm of learning and growing.  His beard like a beacon lighting the way.

Sonnet on Why I Like Folk Music

Ring body's bell with Two Grenadiers.
Ring Brazil's bells with viola and bow.
Dig genetic roots.  Bring forth fiddle tears.
Reveal notes--ancestor's proclivities.
Suggest a new tune around the session.
Speak childish language play divine hymn.
Release dopamine for good infection.
Treated as a baby, play, infect, grin.
Wasted hundreds on lessons.  Work pays more.
Dancing, twirling, posing, my daughter smiles.
Inspired work never feels like working.
Swimming in sound waves--dancers tread miles.
Ring, dig, show, speak, release, smile, work, dance.
Reveal heaven's creation through music's glance.

"Why does Folk Music Sound the Same?"

A few of us get together in a folk/fiddle music group at the school where I teach and play traditional music from Ireland, Scotland, French Canada, New England, Appalachia, and further a field. Not only do we play music, but we often discuss it. In one such interchange the question was asked, “why do you like this kind of music so much--it all seems to sound the same?”  At the time I didn’t reasonably answer either part of this question.  It tends to be more of an emotional than a rational tie. It's something you grow up doing, something you've been initiated into, and dogmatically accepted as good. The limited answers have caused me to try and dig deeper in answering both why folk music sounds the same and reasons it's good more than, "I just like it".  

Does all folk music sound the same?  Since this question first was bounced off my brain a similar question has helped me see it from a different angle.  "Why does every basketball game and play look so much the same?" Stockton to Malone or Steve Nash to anybody may appear similar, but it shines at us anew when we see it against a new opponent.  Basketball looks the same in part because of the rules that restrict players to certain activities, i.e. a ten-foot hoop, a round ball, twelve foot lane, fouls, a time clock, etc. Other contributing factors are that certain moves work well against particular opponents.  Instead of lines on a hardwood floor, musicians historically are restricted within an isolated geography. Therefore environment has shaped the northern, southern, eastern, and western musical traditions of various peoples, nations, and countries. The nature, flow, and accent of a people also work as rules that shape the musical rites. Cowboys that hold onto their vowels and speak with a lazy drawl create sung and played poetry which reflects them. Irish singers and fiddler's percussively roll their “rs” or certain notes just like Irish speakers when they say words like "world" or "girl".  The rolled "r" sounds the same, but "girl" and "world" communicate two unique thoughts. For more examples of folk music reflecting language see the entertaining Lenard Bernstein video "What is Folk Music".  


If we are generally okay with words in our own language sounding the same and basketball plays looking similar than why is it a problem that Folk Music sounds the same?  How do Folk Musicians stomach playing the same thing over and over ad nauseum? Do they just lay down and ashamedly admit their mediocrity in playing undemanding music that can't compare with the greatness of the highbrow concert music? Some might, but where are they? If you're asking why one tune sounds the same as another you just need more time plumbing the depths of this pool. True that each tune's value is not equal. Many have come and gone with their authors. Some, however outlast those who compose them. The heart of this question really begs to know, "What makes one tune desirable or beautiful over a similarly sounding tune?" There are many contributing factors, but perhaps the greatest part of a tune's beauty comes from the player. A friend of mine hates David Brody's version of "Saint Antoine's Reel", but liked it when they listened to this video. If a player can keep your interest through various tunes then beauty is enhanced. The beauty of "The Wood Chopper's reel" is manifest when folks start to tap their feet or get up and dance. Additional instruments often make a tune take on new life. Recently I've added foot percussion to the French Canadian tunes and almost as the first beat hits the floor on cue my children start to dance. When a session is losing the flow, a passionate singer can with their words breath new life into the other players and audience. Soloing is another thing of beauty that tends to swallows up the monotony of repetition. When you're in a large bluegrass session where the solo is passed around the room in a circle or called out by the tune's leader you get so concerned about what you're going to improvise that you don't have time to worry about the tune sounding the same.  Almost all of the "new" things you can add to your playing are precisely because you ask the sameness question and then seek to go deeper. Boredom can actually catalyze the experiment with new and different elements to create and originate on top of that same old song.  


Most of the things in life are "the same". Reading, writing, deciphering, loving, contracting business, and a hundred different things are doomed to this fate. Who said that you have the right to an exciting and new way of reading, writing, loving, doing business, or a hundred different chores in this life? It seems like the opportunity to have your brain washed over with dopamine can be manipulated either through drugs, dangerous extreme sports, or through working hard at the hardest parts of one's job or hobby and feeling the self satisfaction of sincerely doing your best. Drugs are too overrated and what's to show for it? Extreme sports would ruin your spouse's sanity so hang it! Go get doped up on taking your folk music game to the next level!

Stay tuned and we'll look at the other part of the question in the next post.