“Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard.”
—THE CHARLIE DANIELS BAND
WITH THE SPEED of sound, music, cosmically sublime and profound, is perhaps the fastest way to drill into the truth of who you are. Our son Thomas spends the lion’s share of the day playing his guitar. Fortuitously, he was home on the morning I started this chapter—he was figuring out “No Hard Feelings” by the Avett Brothers in his room. I summoned the teenager in. “Well, it’s almost too big, but music is cozy because you can find emotion in ANY song—even if you don’t like it, you can connect to it.” First of all, that is sort of the point of the book: finding connection with anything—even if you don’t like it. Second, I think it’s funny that a teenager would say “finding emotion,” when they seem to have so many emotions in them at all times. Anyway, I was going to explode into writing about dancing in rainstorms as the Grateful Dead jammed onstage, or recall memories of my father driving while Stevie Wonder played on the FM radio. Good Lord, just last night I listened to the Dixie Chicks while making tacos for dinner. Can’t think of anything more satisfying than that—and yet, Thomas is correct, it kinda feels too big. Music is in the same category in my mind as falling in love or giving birth. But cozy?
Then I remembered this little chunk of rosin I had as a young girl. Mum wanted me to learn the cello, I think because she played. I liked it all right, but I wasn’t good at it. Music was hard to read, practicing felt lonely, and I can’t even remember my teacher. But I do remember being taken to rent the cello at a musty string instrument store in the West Forties, where the planks of the wooden floor creaked as you followed the owner back, back, back through rows of violas—like Lucy tiptoeing her way through the wardrobe to find Narnia. The same older Eastern European gentleman helped us organize the rental. If you had told me he was Itzhak Perlman’s personal violin guy, I would have believed you. After fitting me for the cello and bow, he went behind the glass counter filled with sheet music and pulled out a drawer—it sounded like rocks were being disturbed and rolling around. He pulled out an amber nub and placed it in my hand. It smelled oily and like a pine forest. Mum watched happily (it is fun when your kids are introduced to something that could be life changing) as the man taught me to slide it up and down the fibers on my bow, back and forth, slowly and then quickly. The rosin would make the hair tacky, allowing it to grip the strings of the cello better, ideally so one could produce a clear, pretty sound. I was instructed to do this every time before I played, and I certainly followed directions—rosining the bow was the only reason I practiced.
He gave me a piece of mustard-yellow felt too. I kept the folded felt and rosin in a little velvet box with a lid, which was built into the cello case. I felt so official. If I learned anything during that year of playing cello, it wasn’t Bach, it was the ritual of rosining my bow. The tools around the music gave me a pathway in, a little control of something so profound and earthshaking. I feel the same way about the little silver cup Thomas uses to hold his guitar picks. The cup lives in his room, where he plays most. Inside, the medium-hardness picks are at the ready. They lie in wait, ridged and colorful, to be chosen and strummed so he can get lost “finding emotions” in the gigantic, swirling, drowning, life-giving music.