Dad’s been asking me to bring my violin back to Woodthrush because he’s knows that I’ve pretty much stopped playing, and I’ve resisted because a home without a musical instrument seems like it is incomplete. But, in the year that we’ve been in NYC, I’ve had it out of the case exactly twice, both times in our first month there.

I’d started playing when I was five and when I got old enough to have a full-size instrument, Dad let me have this one. He had two, but this one was the louder and I tended to be too quiet. In college, I developed tendinitis in my shoulder and we discovered that I had a congenital condition that got aggravated by, among other things, bowing. Why was college different? That’s when I started working as a puppeteer and, you know, that kind of works the shoulders a bit. I stopped being able to play for more than about twenty minutes at a time, but would still haul it out because I loved it.

But the frequency got farther apart. The interesting thing is that I’d pick the instrument up and for about five minutes could play like I’d never stopped and then it was as if my brain caught up and said, “Whoa! Whoa! Are you crazy? You can’t play this thing,” and it would all vanish.

It got progressively more frustrating to pull it out of the case and know how much my skills had dropped. I mean, I was never brilliant, but I played for seventeen years and now it’s… well, it’s like a foreign language. I look at sheet music that I remember being able to play and it’s so hard now. With the shoulder thing, it’s not like I could work at it and regain the old level.

So, since Dad asked, and it’s his birthday, I’ve brought the violin home.