Story of how a bastard child became an award-winning journalist; told with humor.
Excerpt
Some things that happen in a person’s formative years remain mysteries all a person’s life. My formative years were in Canton, Ohio. The mystery was why my foster mother felt I should play the violin.
But she did and she convinced her husband to buy me an old instrument hanging in a pawn shop. It had a small crack in its body, two broken strings and a bow with so many horsehairs missing it looked like a device invented to floss elephants’ teeth.
It was in the mid-1930s when hundreds of thousands of unemployed men would stoop to do anything for a few dollars. Men came to our door offering to sharpen knives. They offered to paint the house, fix broken appliances, do any needed house repairs, weed the garden, all for a couple of dollars, or, at times, only a meal.
I don’t know what Mr. Dix, my violin instructor, had done before the Depression. I like to think he had played first violin with the Cleveland 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 hitchhiking through Canton 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.I don’t think 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.
Read more about I Never Looked for My Mother and Other Regrets of a Journalist and Joseph P. Ritz HERE.
Copyright 2009 Joseph P. Ritz. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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