On Sunday we rescued Jill & baby Allison from the Portland comic book show and went, inevitably, to a coupla estate sales.
Alli almost got a violin. They wanted $285, or bid, for a fairly decent-sounding fiddle, banged-up old case, and bow in need of rehairing.
After consultation, and a call to Parker at the show, Jill and Parker decided to bid; alas, by the time we got back to place it, someone else had paid the full amount and taken it away.
But investigating the instrument at the sale made me think about violin again.
So we went home and I got out mine.
I hadn’t touched it in, literally, years. I played some Vivaldi and Bach for Ms. Allison. She seemed to like it.
I started violin in fifth grade, played it all through high school and into college. I even worked at a violin shop for a few years. I stopped playing for a while in grad school. (I stopped doing a lot of things in grad school. Including, mostly, writing, and, largely, sleeping.)
Then, not long after we moved to Portland, I found some community orchestras to play in, and took lessons from the very cool Marilee Hord. But I never practiced enough, and I felt guilty about that, and I felt guilty about the writing I wasn’t doing when I was playing, and so what should have been fabulous — the chance to play and learn music — turned into Yet Another Thing To Stress About. So I stopped, figuring that working full-time, writing, trying to get to the damn gym often enough to stave off total physical collapse, and having some form of a social life didn’t leave any room for violin.
But you know, I miss it. I don’t have the faintest idea how to make music fit into my life, but I miss it, and it felt good to play again.
Does anyone else have something — not necessarily music — in their lives that they can’t figure out how to make a space for? Or do you have any ideas about making time for music?