It’s impossible to play the violin without supernatural assistance.
I learned the truth of that a long time ago when I was seven.
I don’t know what evil Mr. Dix, my violin instructor, had done to earn the task of teaching me the instrument. I like to think he had played first violin with a great orchestra and lost his job for putting too much rosin on his bow strings at a time the management was cutting expenses and that he had fallen in love with a young woman while hitch-hiking on his way to find a job in Cincinnati and so remained in our city.
Whatever wrong he had done, he looked like he needed a meal and his frayed collar and sleeve ends showed that he needed a new shirt. Unfortunately, he was also a serious lover of music.
Pianists only have to hit the correct a key to get the right note. No one can play the violin without signing a pact with the devil.
It defies the laws of physics for a human to press his finger on a taut string in exactly the right place two times in a row while holding a hollow wooden box with his chin and, with his other hand, drawing part of a horse’s tail across the string. Not only that, but the string on which the tail is being rubbed must be the right one out of four possible choices. If that isn’t difficult enough, consider this: the bow must not touch the other strings. It cannot be done by a human. It requires the aid of supernatural power, whether from the devil, or from God.
Catholic school kids were compelled to ask a lot of God, mostly through the Virgin Mother and enough saints to triple the population density of California, a place which is not their natural habitat. The nuns told us of angels who came down from heaven and helped boys and girls who prayed for help with their homework -- some even did some of the work for them. I prayed for help a lot. Why study or practice when you can get an angel to do it for you?
I was too scared of authority to pray to God directly to help me find E flat, or to send down one of His angels who could do it. You didn’t want to upset someone who could send you directly to hell with trivial matters. I prayed to the fourteen saints or so who had the reputation of being the top agents, the ones who could bypass all the secretaries and personal assistants and get though to God at his private, unlisted number.
Not even St. Jude, the patron of the impossible, could help. What came out of my violin sounded like a cat with its tail caught under a rocker. It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Dix had so many pupils he could afford to lose one. After six weeks of lessons, he still wore frayed shirts and looked like he was on a two week fast. But starvation was preferable to listening to me make the scraping sounds of a rusty hinge. A cow rubbing against a barbed wire fence made more melody.
He told my parents the task was hopeless and was never seen again.
But my mother didn’t give up. When I was in sixth grade she bought a small marimba with her Avon money and brought it in the house saying I was to learn to play it.
“We let you choose the violin. Now I’m going to choose what you’re going to play.”
It was useless to protest that I hadn’t chosen the violin.
I had never seen a marimba, which is like a xylophone with long tubes hanging down from it. The ones they use mostly in orchestras which play Latin American music have tubes of polished metal. Mine had cardboard tubes like the ones inside a roll of paper towels, except they were painted silver and had a metal cap on one end.
She choose the marimba for me because the man in the apartment next to her when she was young had played the instrument and she had been fascinated watching him hold several mallets in each hand and pound out music.
I never got to the several mallets in each hand phase. But at least when I hit a wooden bar that had “E-” engraved on it, I got “E-.”