What was it? Three, four years ago. The Heir had saved his pennies and bought a Stratocaster. He pawed over my old setlists and practiced and practiced. I took him with me to an old friend’s house, and we reassembled the wreckage of a band that used to make a little scratch down Cape Cod way. The boy wanted to play with a real, live band.
We were, technically, alive, so we let him.
[Update: Thanks to Dave, for hitting the music equipment jar again. It seems to be paying dividends already. You can almost hear and see them in the videos now. And thanks, Gareth! And Henry! Thanks]
His older brother is a teenager, and has gone quiet. But he is not inscrutable. The little one is literally inscrutable. He is my flesh and blood and kith and kin and I have no idea what’s going on in there sometimes.
He is currently sitting in the dining room. It’s the only really warm room in the house. He’s eating a waffle and reading a Calvin and Hobbes compendium aloud to no one — or everyone, including one sleeping person. He also has handy a giant book of New Yorker cartoons that he reads by the hour. He reads them over and over, but never laughs at those. He reads them like a stock report. Then he turns to a giant, 1000 page visual dictionary he stole from his brother’s room. He reads them all like morning newspapers.
After he’s done eating and reading, he’ll probably watch physics lectures on YouTube on an elderly laptop we keep in there. I have no idea why he watches physics lectures on YouTube. He doesn’t seem to think there’s any difference between physics lectures and the Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys for entertainment purposes. He often sits impassive while watching the most absurd thing in a viral video, like it’s instructional, then laughs at gravity drawn on a whiteboard. None of this has anything to do with his schoolwork. He does all this stuff before his schoolwork. Whenever I see those whiteboard animation lectures that are popular in college nowadays, I can’t help noticing that they’re perfectly suited to a nine-year-old’s attention span and interest, as long as it has nothing to do with school. Parents are blowing 40 large on Sesame Street Science class for children that shave and drive and occasionally procreate.
He likes lists and like things, like many small boys. He favors flags right now. He’s fond of drawing each one in Microsoft Paint. He draws all sorts of things in Paint. He’s the last person in the world to use it, I think. He exhibits a behavior I admire. He’ll be interested in something, so he’ll try to reproduce it in every medium at his disposal. He likes Calvin and Hobbes, so he draws them in crayon, and then in Paint, and then he assembles giant totems of them out of blocks in Minecraft, and then he gets outre and draws the giant, blocky versions of them he made in Minecraft in Paint again. Then he erases is all and starts in on something else.
I do not spend as much time with my children as I’d like. I am always around, but I am busy. Yesterday I took a moment to try to teach the little feller something on the drums. His older brother had learned the guitar parts of a song, but the drumming was, I thought, more complex than anything the little boy had ever heard. I showed him a video of the fellows playing the original song, and it was a regular music video, not just a performance, and he was giggling uncontrollably at the way the rock stars presented themselves. He did not know that they did not intend to appear as clowns. He thought they were the circus. He wanted to watch it forty times, but wouldn’t pay attention to the musical part. He could wear out a stone, that boy.
I painstakingly learned the drum parts and went upstairs and haltingly worked them out on the drum set. It took me fifteen minutes or so to get through it, slowly, once. It was deuced difficult. Then I went and got the little weirdo and stood him next to me at the drum throne and tried to teach it to him. He wiggled all around, and looked at the ceiling like there was money up there, and fidgeted enough for me to ask him if he needed to go to the bathroom, and he looked out the window, and generally ignored me until I was exasperated. I could tell he wanted to watch the video, and all this other stuff I was on about was superfluous.
We do not force any musical instruction on the kids. They play because they want to, or don’t. I got up because it was pointless to continue. He sat down and played it, without error, right away. I hate that little kid sometimes.
He wants to be funny. He’s still unsure exactly how to be funny. He says riotous things at dinner, and we all laugh until tears come. He starts after we do, and laughs more uproariously than we do, and then gets stonefaced and says, “I don’t know why that’s funny,” and we laugh at that, too.
I advise you to get a little boy or two and watch them. They’re better than television, and use less electricity.
Romanian Folk Dances is a good soundtrack for a Maine winter. Not sure why –although hurrying through the Borgo Pass while the wolves howl in the shadow of Castle Dracul is a lot like going to South Paris, Maine in December to drop off a package at the Going Postal shipping store. There are more Pitbulls roaming around South Paris, so it edges out Wallachia for danger, I think.
Henryk Szeryng was born in Poland in 1918. He was Jewish. Even a casual reader of European history would immediately see what sort of future a baby born there and then might be in for. A Greek playwright couldn’t come up with a sword big enough to hang over your head in Act I. We can’t blame him for not amounting to much. No, really; we can’t.
He started in on piano when he was five, taught by his mother. Oh, dear; a homeschooler. When he was seven, he took up violin. Piano must have been too hard for him. Well, it’s too hard for everyone else; I don’t see why it would be easy for him. It sounds like he was well-to-do; he eventually studied in Paris and Berlin, and was a notable player before he was twenty. He played with the Warsaw Philharmonic, playing Brahms, when he was only fifteen years old. I don’t know about you, but I was still building model airplanes when I was fifteen. I don’t want to cast aspersions; you may have been building real airplanes when you were fifteen for all I know.
Later on, when things got very unpleasant indeed in Europe, a certain General Sikorski, who was the head of the Polish government in exile, noticed the young fiddle player spoke seven languages besides being able to play Bach. When I was in my early twenties, I could make myself misunderstood in about three languages, if you include English, so there’s that. I also knew the bass line to Jump Into The Fire by Harry Nilsson, so I had the musical waterfront covered as well. You may have been less accomplished than I was. I don’t judge.
In 1941, Sikorski went to Mexico to beg them to let 4000 Polish refugees, ie, Jews, settle there. Szeryng went with him, had an epiphany, and decided to become Mexican himself, and eventually taught at the National University of Mexico. I don’t think he taught animal husbandry.
In the fifties, Arthur Rubinstein dropped by Mexico City, went to see Szeryng, and after hearing him play, convinced him to start playing concerts again. I don’t hear from you as often as I’d like, so I’m unsure how many times Arthur Rubinstein came over to your place and asked you to do things internationally, but the only time I spoke to old Art, he only asked me to paint his fence. I may be misremembering this; it’s a while ago. It may have been a housewife name Agnes Morgenstern that had the fence that needed painting. At any rate, I’m sure Arthur Rubinstein would have had some sort of use for you; you’re likely a lot sweller than I am. Most people are.
So our friend Szeryng made recordings and traveled the world giving concerts, sawing away at a Stradivarius violin when his good violin, a Guarnieri del Gesu, was in the shop having its bolts tightened or something. I don’t think he liked the Stradivarius all that much; he gave it to the State of Israel in the seventies, hoping they’d loan it out to some underachievers like him from time to time to bang away on.
He couldn’t sit still, that guy. I am loath to call him a drifter, but I can’t find out if he moved around a lot over unpaid gas bills or too many parking tickets or what. He lived in Paris, and eventually died in 1988 in Monaco, flying back and forth from both to Mexico on a diplomatic passport because he was Mexico’s official cultural ambassador. I don’t know about you, but I once rode in an AMC Ambassador, which is a comparable thrill, I’m telling you. You may have only ridden in a Pacer, so I won’t mention it again. I don’t want to make you feel like an underachiever.
Environmentalists love boats made like this. I’ve made boats like this. Been to plenty of boatyards, too. All the evil stuff left in our world is still used in the boatyard. Toluene; acetone; MEK; heavy metals; lead; fiberglass resin; hell, even the sawdust from the funky woods can give you nose cancer. Better to just let the maker read the label on the West System cans and paddle around the lake untroubled.
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