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!”