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Pickled Thumbs

Feb7
Still-Life with Cello

Still-Life with Cello | Credit: Sxc.hu | Click to embiggen

Today is this first day of the first session of 30 Days to Creativity an eClass created by my friend Debra and myself. In keeping with the spirit of the class, I’m actually participating – and I’m up before seven AM and feeling “writey,” so I think it’s working already.

One of my on-going projects is a piece of fan-fiction set in the Star Trek: the Next Generation world. It’s something I started because of an Idea niggling at my brain, and something I continue because playing in someone else’s sandbox can be a way to have fun writing without the pressure of publication. I’m enjoying the exercise. In any case, my main non-canon character there is a cello student, and that story, combined with today’s prompt, has me thinking about my own first cello teacher: Dan Guillian.

I was nine when I met Mr. Guillian. My best friend Jill was taking violin lessons, and I was obsessed with her violin. Sensing that she’d never be able to practice without something to distract me, she told him that I might be interested in learning an instrument. A few days later, I was called out of class, and asked to visit the basement of the school.

In those days – Colorado in the 1970′s – music lessons were offered by the schools, and we could rent instruments for just a few dollars a month. Mr. Guillian and I met, and I remember taking an instant liking to the merry twinkle in his eye, and his impish sense of humor. I wanted to play the violin, but so did everyone, and really, I’m too short to be a decent violinist, so he suggested I try the cello. “You,” he told me, as if he were reading my future, “have Cello Hands.”

And so, I became a cello student. One of only two young cellists in our school – the other was a sixth-grader named Connie – I got to leave my regular classes for an hour each week, and make my way to the basement music room, where we’d have our group lesson. Mr. Guillian was demanding, but made the process fun at the same time. “I have a jar,” he would tell us, in a tone that was never entirely joking, “full of pickled thumbs. It’s where I put all the thumbs that aren’t holding instruments correctly.” And so we’d all make sure our thumbs were resting against the necks of our instruments, not squeezing, but balancing the weight.

We used the Suzuki books (really, are there any modern string or piano players who did NOT go through the Suzuki books), which are based on learning to play by ear and by rote, and learning the names of notes later. To this day, the first time I look at a piece of music, I interpret the black notes as fingerings – 4 3 4 2, extend, 1, etc. – instead of G, F#, G, E, (extend) A. I know how it should sound, but have to THINK about the proper nomenclature.

It may not seem like it, but nine is really old to be starting a stringed instrument. Most really good cellists and violinists start when they’re five or six – as soon as they have the upper-arm strength to hold a bow. But my late start never bothered me. The Jefferson County Public Schools were amazingly supportive of all their music students, and Mr. Guillian gave me his daughter’s cello (though I never knew it until years later) to practice on at home, so I wouldn’t have to carry such a large instrument (when I started, my half-sized cello was nearly as tall as I was) back and forth all the time.

The next school year saw my first concert as a cellist and not just a choir member (though choir was always a big part of school, as well). Air on a G String (Bach) was rewritten for a string ensemble, with Mr. Guillian’s son, who was college aged, but seemed so old and slightly exotic, playing the lead melody. (Someone wrote lyrics for it as well, dubbing it “One String Melody.” A Google search turns up NOTHING about this, but I KNOW there were lyrics.) I experienced my first county orchestra (we’d all walk together to the junior high school for rehearsal), my first summer music camp, my first real kiss…(from Gil, a cellist from a rival school). It was also the year I got my first real pair of stockings (as opposed to tights) which I wore to an orchestra performance where Mr. Guillian had a solo on his double bass, and managed to make a tux looked jaunty.

He had a white goatee and twinkling blue eyes, and his voice was firm, but never harsh. To my nine-year-old self he seemed as old as Albus Dumbledore must have seemed to Harry Potter, though he lacked the voluminous robes, and he gave me music in a way no one ever had before, or would again. (In reality, he probably wasn’t much older than I am now, but when you’re nine, and a small nine-year-old, at that, someone in their forties seems positively venerable.)

Years later, at the jaded age of not-quite-16, I would find myself walking out of a master class with Danish cellist Anders Grøn, who was teaching at the National Cello Institute’s summer program in Pomona, CA, and coming face-to-face with one of Mr. Guillian’s colleagues from the Colorado public school system. I would smile at her, and say hello, but just before I had the opportunity to ask her about my old teacher, she would be pulled away.

My cello sits upstairs in it’s special humidity-regulating case, balanced against the back wall of the library closet. I take it out every few months, but my nails are too long to really play (and I like them that way – all my life, the rosin for the bow would give me these incredibly strong nails that I had to keep cutting short, and now I have lovely sparkly acrylic tips, and spend whole afternoons getting mani-pedis a couple of times a month), and writing and voice acting are my biggest creative pursuits these days.

Still, every so often, I’ll see a large jar in the condiments aisle of the grocery store filled with something like marinated mushrooms, something I would never buy, and I can’t help but think of Mr. Guillian and his collection of pickled thumbs.

Ice Dreams

Jan28

Outdoor Skating | Source: iStockPhoto.com | Click to embiggen

I’m sitting on the bed, folding clean laundry and watching the 2012 National Championships of Ice Skating. It’s one of the three sports I actually follow with any real interest, and this year’s championships were in San Jose. If we both still lived there, it’s the kind of thing my mother and I would have gone to as a mother-daughter thing.

Ice skating has always been an important part of my relationship with my mother.

I remember my first pair of skates, which had four blades, and didn’t let me go very fast, but kept me on my feet. And my second pair, the kind with double blades (the kind Donny Osmond used to wear in the opening of the Donny and Marie show). My mother used to hold my hands and skate backwards so I could skate forward.

When we lived in Georgetown, CO, they (the “town”) used to turn the baseball diamond in the park into a skating rink in winter. My friends and I would walk there after school, and skate til the streetlights came on (if we could last that long), then run home for cocoa. Sometimes there would still be snow on the ice, and it would melt into the laces, and your fingers would freeze as you tried to untie your skates.

Sometimes my parents would take me out to the reservoir, when it froze, and we’d skate there. The wind and water were so cold that the ice on the lake would freeze into waves, so the ride would be bumpy. If you were tall enough, you could hold a snow shovel up like a sail, and let the wind push you across the cold, green ice. I was never really tall enough, but I kept trying, anyway.

Skating outside was not the graceful sort of skating you can do indoors. I wore a coat and hat and gloves or mittens, and had tights on under my jeans. Sometimes, if it was really cold, my mother would make me wear scratchy silver socks with flecks of shiny metal in them, over the tights. I was so warm in those my feet would sweat, and then they’d get cold anyway, and I hated the itchy texture.

The last time I bought ice skates was the year the Sharks moved to San Jose, and they began offering public skating sessions at their practice rink. Some of the newer players worked in the pro shop, and it’s quite the thing to have a hockey player holding your tiny foot in his large, calloused hands, helping you find the right size.

I haven’t worn those skates since before I married Fuzzy, but they’re in the closet, with the guards still on, and the white leather still too-shiny, and too-stiff, from not enough use.

There’s a rink in the mall eight miles from here, but even though I keep looking up their times, I never manage to go. I’m not sure my ankles can handle skating any more, honestly.

Even so, I love to watch skating, and when the program is over, and I’m tucked up in bed, I know my dreams will glide out onto the ice, and the memory of skating will inform my dreams, and it will feel like flying.