My Father’s Violin

The trouble all started when Bill and I bought a house with a big, beautiful barn. We were newlyweds, each with 20+ years of marriage behind us and eight kids between us.

Oh, the kids were all off and running, but still… and here’s where the barn comes in. “Just put it in the barn. One of the kids will want it.” Bill often said, and we both believed it - bed frames, conga drum, guitar amp, drop-leaf table, you name it, it piled up in the barn.

And so, when the time came to leave the place, well, overwhelmed hardly captures it.

We decided to give it all to the Lions’ for their annual sale - a long-forgotten rental cello from Weymouth Public Schools, the stained-glass making equipment we bought after taking a course (Bill created a few gorgeous windows!), ladders, a harp, a stool, plastic bags full of unknown stuff, the papier-mâché masks I had made for my mini opera about Mad King Sweeney and on and on into the night. In the overload of it all, and the need to get the job done, and the moving to a smaller place, I included my father’s violin in the junk to be given away. The violin that had accompanied me all through my childhood. The violin that my father took out every year to play Christmas carols. I had become the family piano player because the others had quit piano by then and the original player - mother - was probably in the kitchen, stuffing the turkey.

Along the way, I played Dad’s violin occasionally- learning a jig here, a waltz there.

Memory becomes the golden thread that weaves our young selves to our middle selves, our middle selves on into our older selves. We are a tapestry of our ecstasies and victories, our failures and our sorrows, which Edith Wharton dubbed ‘the arch enemy’.

Which brings me back to my father’s violin. That decision to set it on the cart full of junk to be given away, has stayed with me, not as a day-to-day torment, but as a random and unexpected seed that sprouts in unexplainable ways. A sorrow, a loss of my father, a loss of a golden thread in my life. A niggling regret. I even once wrote to the Lions, explaining about my father’s violin, wondering if they happen to know who bought it. I knew there would be no response and there was none. So that was that.

Until last month. When I decided to get me a violin, knowing the risk that it could never replace what was lost. Facebook marketplace sent me to a rather sad neighborhood of duplexes in Nashua NH. The ad said played in a Boston orchestra. OK, so perhaps it was a struggling musician thing. A kid burst out of the left-side unit, away from the yelling inside. Cautionary voices began to speak in my head. I pressed on, knocked on the front door on the right side, inspecting the paper taped over the side-light. A woman, too worn out for her middle age, the smell of smoke overwhelming us both, opened the door a crack. Just a minute, she motioned, with an upturned pointer finger. In short order, a man who had also been through the mill, then appeared, with a violin case. He opened the door a crack and slipped out. We stood on the stoop while he showed me the violin. Beautiful, shiny, black. The smell of smoke is what I remember most. Voices, voices in my head. I took it out of the case, the tuning pegs didn’t turn. The strings were flaccid. It was unplayable. Just needs a bit of love I thought, while the voices continued. I asked about the Boston orchestra part. “Oh, the guy upstairs…he’s transgender.. no gay. He knows about that.” Eventually, he came down, said he HAD played a flute in Boston. My inner voice was screaming, just like in the cartoons, KATY, GET OUT OF HERE. THIS IS A SCAM!!! But I did not. I handed the man $75, my voices reassuring me that this crew needed the money more than me. It’d buy them a few cartons of cigarettes.

I walked away with my beautiful, shiny black violin, which reeked of smoke - useful as a table ornament or perhaps I could make it into a lamp. (If only we had kept all that electrical junk from the barn!)

I found a violin repair guy, gave him a call. Don’t even bother trying to fix it. Those violins are around. They’re useless. He’s the one who gave me the idea for a lamp, actually. Yes, he repairs and refurbishes, sells and rents violins. He gave me directions to his house. I drove down a very long, winding dirt driveway running deep into the woods. My inner cartoon voice started up again, but I kept going, eventually landing at the large garage workshop of a retired firefighter and master restorer, repairer. He was buried in stringed instruments!

As he showed me the violin he had chosen for me and reminded me how to hold the bow etc. we got chatting about this and that, eventually landing on contra dance music. I played piano and string bass in a local band back in 1979. Turns out, so did he. What band? Twopenny Loaf, he answered. What??!!?? Same small contra dance band, slightly different time frame. At one point, he was talking about a lady who used to play piano in the band. She had given him a few pointers on how to play the piano. He started to say the name - Katy Be… he stopped in mid-sentence to look at me. That was me. Katy Beane in those glorious child-creating years. I had moved on to a life of music and theater in the Boston area, but was now back on the North Shore. Forty year old threads began to glisten in that garage workshop, catapulting both of us along the filaments stretching from past to present and back again.

And so, if you’re looking for me, I’ll be in the barn (the back bedroom), trying to remember how to play the violin, with the help of VIOLIN FOR DUMMIES and an infinite number of instructors on YouTube. I am more interested in jazz violin than contra dance at this point. Perhaps when I’m 90, I’ll know a few licks!

But either way, Dad is smiling down on me, waiting for the Christmas carols.