I’m off on another tangent… starting a new chapter. For the next few months (hopefully), I will be blogging about a new musical venture of mine… beginning at the beginning:

 

Forty-Seven Years, seven months and I’m not sure how many days after leaving high school, I re-connected with an old friend. This is the story of that re-connection and my efforts to have as good a relationship with that friend as I did when I attended public schools in the late sixties and early seventies.

That old friend was my cello.

I say old friend in a wistful way. Truth is that for a while, I hated the cello because my parents forced me to practice half an hour every day in the kitchen of the home where we lived in suburban Cleveland Ohio. It wasn’t until many years after I quit at the end of high school that I came to appreciate the instrument; eventually coming to rue my decision not to continue to play.

My decision to take up playing the cello at the tender age of 65 was rooted in a number of events; not the least of which was my quiet gentle whining about how much I missed playing the cello despite my enmity toward the instrument for a few of the years I played it. Since there is a lot of story, here, perhaps it would be wise to begin at the beginning…

 

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Whenever the subject of music came up, I told people that as a child I played on the linoleum.

I did more than that, really.

Until the school system gave us flutophones when we were in the fourth grade, I never played an instrument. There are, doubtless, parents out there who have bad memories of kids bringing flutophones or some similar apparatus into the home and wreaking havoc with whatever measure of peace and quiet they might have had.

Flutophones ended up being the gateway instruments to the bigger things like real flutes, real drums, real trombones and real violins. Close to the end of the school year, I recall being led into the school library and being told that I could choose any instrument I wanted to play starting when I was in the fifth grade.

I chose the cello for, what in my mind, was a very valid reason.

Sometime in the previous year, my eye was caught by an article in the Britannica yearbook showing young Japanese students being taught to play the violin using the Suzuki method. What struck me and led to my choosing to play the cello was that the violin students were standing up.

Cellos are played sitting down.

My fundamental laziness led me to choose what I would later find out to be the one instrument requiring more physical prowess than most other instruments.

After making my choice and telling my parents, the next step was to procure a ¾ size cello from a music shop in nearby Berea Ohio. With that came music lessons provided by the school district where I learned the fundamentals and eventually played tunes.

I don’t recall too much about the first two years of playing other than my parents being amused that one of my teachers during the summer session between the fifth and sixth grade was named Richard Tracy. They explained to me that men named Richard were usually nicknamed Dick, and my finally tying it into one of my favorite comic strips.

One thing I do recall was my loathing of having to practice.

I dreaded the half hour daily of having to sit next to the doorway between the kitchen and the main hallway and sawing away on the damn thing. In retrospect, my parents were doing the right thing in enforcing the practice sessions as it would provide me with a discipline I may not have otherwise had.

Toward the end of the sixth grade, string players from all Berea city school district elementary schools were gathered into an all-city orchestra. It wasn’t until after our performance that my father told me that the girl sitting next to me was the daughter of one of the Cleveland Browns. Dad was impressed despite not being a fan of professional sports, and Mom wondered how I got along with the girl now that puberty was starting to stare me in the face. Jill G’s parents lived in a mysterious corner of Berea, where we lived in adjacent Middleburg Heights, so there was little chance of social contact if any.

The seventh grade brought a few changes other than my impending adolescence. Most importantly, I was in junior high and lessons taught by employees of the school system came to an end.

My parents managed to latch on to a woman living near Berea High School named Mrs. Hiller to be my teacher. She taught out of her home and had the reputation of being one of the best, if not the best cello teachers in the Cleveland area. Somehow, I got to the front of the waiting line and got to have her as my teacher.

Mrs. Hiller challenged me. She wasn’t satisfied with just teaching the basics, she challenged me with music which might have been just out of my reach at the time I started but was able to master rather quickly under her guidance.

Another important change was that I had outgrown the ¾ size cello and was ready to graduate to a full-size instrument.

Part of the change had to do with the rental place going out of business. My father was reluctant to spend the money needed to put me into one of the full-size cellos that the fellow had available, so he scoured the local newspaper and found a full-size cello for sale. He called the number in the ad, grabbed me and took me to a birthday party at a house in a mysterious corner of Berea belonging to Jill G’s famous father.

He was hosting a birthday party for one of his Cleveland Browns teammates but managed to conduct the sale – even offering us a piece of birthday cake in the bargain!

A few days after we got home with the “new” cello, word slipped out about where we got it. It was only when my peers in the immediate neighborhood figured out that I didn’t get any autographs that I figured out that I should have gotten some autographs.