back to fiddling.

The pursuit of a working fiddle has taken me to some interesting places. This summer it was the third floor of Lexington and Calvert, downtown Baltimore, to the Perrins’ violin shop--a bank headquarters in its former life, where now the walk-in safes in every room house spare pegs and bows. The Perrins guys gave me a nice fiddle set-up, for which I paid nice fiddle set-up rates--but still I had problems.

When, after a couple months of cranking out the five tunes I’ve learned well enough to not break your ears, my E and A pegs reverted to shameless and relentless slipping, I decided to try something else. I called Thomas Melton, whom I’d gotten wind of via the Acousticopia music shop in Annapolis.

It was a forty-five minute drive south, to a cul-de-sac at the tip of Churchton, Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay took off in every direction but west. My sad fiddle and I walked into a cluster of houses and outbuildings where a back stair led to Melton’s second-floor shop.

Retired in name only, Thomas Melton has done well enough in construction to feed his hobby/business/obsession with violins. He also makes hand-turned wooden bowls, waterfowl decoys, and goes rockfish fishing in the Bay--interests which were all reflected in the tools and artifacts covering every spare inch of his shop.

It seemed that the Perrins guys hadn’t thought to clean out the 150+ years of rosin, oil, and peg dope which were gunking the insides of my peg holes. Melton did it, then rummaged through a drawer which must have represented a 200 year history of fiddle pegs, before finding me an E peg fat enough for my fiddle’s old holes. He noted that my chin rest was not only higher than average, but seemed to do me no good at all based on my hold, and traded me for something more suitable. I bought a shoulder rest that he had on hand, having never much liked my old standard-issue music student model, and he got me put back together and, at least for the moment, in tune.

He does it for fun, not money, which was evidenced by his charging me 25 bucks for some careful, meticulous work, and even then instructing that I should tell him if that was too much. It wasn’t. He has numerous music teachers who are both friends and customers to whom he’ll donate half and three-quarter-sized violins he’s acquired and patched up, when they have eager but needy pupils. I’m glad I met him.

The earth is not always firm

When life takes off in a direction that runs contrary to assumptions you’ve held for years, it can take a really long time to adjust. Especially if you’ve had a shaky sense of self-definition all along.

Oh, and here's a problem with shaky senses of self-definition: I just picked up a Title Nine catalog. I basically like Title Nine stuff even though I don't need rock-climbing clothes. The catalog is sprinkled with vignettes featuring real-people models engaged in active pursuits while spiffily clad in Title Nine items.

This is typical of the profiles they print under the pics: "Juliska weaves prairie grasses into her own line of sleepwear while teaching Mandarin Chinese to her two toddlers. She enjoys striving for her personal best in 20K marathons, and leads yoga classes for the NYPD in her spare time." Sometimes I want to look at the clothes, and sometimes I want to take a bottle-opener to Juliska's stylin' spandex britches.

I guess I could be a Title Nine model. I would wear whatever they told me to, and the caption would read thusly: "Emily sucks dog fur out of corners while trying to convince her kids that she really didn't fix anything for dinner. She can dodge a teenage verbal zinger clocked at 60mph while hurdling a chopsaw. Her personal motto is 'get your own spoon.'"

Clements' EZ Park

There’s a small sedan blocking our front walkway and paperbox today. While I appreciate that the guests at the neighbor kid’s beer blast didn’t encroach on our yard, being three feet into the road makes the car an easy target for sideswipes. And as our entire front footage was parked in last night, I’ve been mighty tempted to re-institute our “Welcome to EZ Park--25cents/hour for pretty cars, 75cents/hour for ugly cars” tickets. (Plus, these guys should be charged extra for Jeff picking up their empty Bud Light cans.) I think it’s that we’re the people on the block least likely to get petty about sacrificing our border to other people’s parties. And I don’t want to be petty, but I’ve been trying to think of a humorous way to suggest that they might not want to leave the car there all weekend.

a dog walk

In the true spirit of a blog, here are a few themeless rambles.

Fred-fred and I took a very nice walk today. Odd, that since I live two blocks from Severn School, I’ve never seen the new academic buildings from closer than across the football field. Now, the fact that I don’t send my kids to the local private prep school is a matter of philosophy, economics, and handy public schools which are, all in all, not bad.

Still, I’ve continued to think about it as if it were the same venerable institution with creaky, ivy covered buildings. It’s not. Wow. Someone’s Harvard endowment contribution must’ve taken a wrong turn in New Jersey and ended up funding a couple academic buildings worthy of Bill Gates. The buildings are huge, the lounges are college caliber, the lunch room is enormous. And get this--there’s a pendulum in the entry way. That’s right. A big one too. Swinging from a ceiling 3 stories up. Severn School thinks its the Smithsonian now.

And then I noticed this plaque on one of the brick columned colonnades connecting an old building to the mega-new one. A plaque stating that the colonnade was a gift of--people I know. People whose kid Gabe used to go to school with at Summit. A kid whom he still considers a friend despite the fact that his attempts to interest this kid in a get-together over the past couple years have not panned out. Which I’m ok with since every time I used to have to wait at the electronic community gate to transport him to their chateau I was gripped by an unattractive surge of counter-snobbery and wanted to say to the speaker-box “No thank you--I’d best send Gabe up to entertain your child while I wait here so as not to bring cooties into the neighborhood.”

The truth is, they’ve never behaved snobbily toward me, nor has anyone else who sends kids to prep school--I must just get some kind of weird kick from playing inadequacy mind games.