Connections: Heartstrings

It’s been a big week. No, I’m not actually talking about the big week in the halls of government, but about the week here at home. I’ve surprised myself by adopting a dog, I’ve sung with the Choral Society of the Hamptons in a superlative concert (if I say so myself), and been host to five young men. 

We year-rounders have a right to be ambivalent about summer. Sure, we appreciate the pleasures that bring others here — quiet corners of the beach in evening, June strawberries, July tomatoes, August corn — but most of us work longer, and often harder, hours come the season. And then, naturally, our homes become hostelries when guests arrive.

This time, our visit from house guests was an unadulterated pleasure.

One of the five young men was the husband of one of my husband’s nieces (I can hardly follow that myself!), a swell and interesting man, who was nice to get better acquainted with. The other four were musicians imported to augment the local members of the South Fork Chamber Orchestra for the Choral Society concert. 

Although we do sing, Chris and I mostly live vicariously where music is concerned. Our own concerts aren’t frequent. We tend to pounce at any opportunity to hear live music. Last weekend, our visitors played French horn, bassoon, violin, and trumpet. We could hear them practicing in their upstairs bedrooms, as we chased our new dog, Sookie, around the backyard. Is there anything nicer than music pouring down from an open window?

We had a great time talking with them . . . and because of Uncle Mor ris’s violin. 

Some readers may remember my eccentric Uncle Morris, an artist who spent a year or two here way back in the 1980s. He dressed in homespun woolens, made friends at the library, flirted with girls 60 years his junior, and was a generally notable presence, with his white beard, as he walked up and down Main Street. 

I inherited his violin many moons ago and just had it repaired. 

We gathered for dinner with our new musician friends the first night. At one point Ralph Allen — the violinist —  left the table and disappeared into the next room. Suddenly, we were listening to Bach. He reported that the violin was a little stiff and needing playing and he continued to pick it up whenever he could during the weekend. What unexpected joy.

For me, of course, Uncle Morris’s violin is more than a nice instrument. It is loaded with family memories, and hearing it played reminds me of the best of them.

Uncle Morris was said to be a child prodigy. I imagine him as a little curly-haired boy with a violin in New York City, but only knew him, much later in life, as an itinerant world traveler who told us he paid for passage on steamers  by playing music and earned food in even later years by drawing unusual, swirling portraits of strangers on the sidewalks of Reykjavik. 

I’m not sure any of my grandchildren could be called a prodigy, but one of my granddaughters studied viola for a while, and I keep imagining that she will pick up Uncle Morris’s violin and give it a try. Or that perhaps one of my husband’s grandsons, the one who is playing the violin as an elementary student in Massachusetts, will stick with it and merit the gift of Uncle Morris’s violin some day. 

A grandmother can dream, can’t she? 

In the meantime, I am pleased that another granddaughter is learning the clarinet and was chosen to play in a recent regional event. Yet another granddaughter is taking guitar lessons with the nice fellows at Crossroads in Amagansett. Music brings us such pleasure, and we fervently hope the younger generations’ lives — whether they play Bach’s E Major Partita or Van Morrison’s “Moon Dance” — are enriched by it, too.