Fluent in Subtitles

Today is Thelma Ritter’s birthday.

Thelma Ritter was born on Valentine’s Day, on Hart Street in Brooklyn. I kid you not.

By way of honoring the uber-empress of Hollywood character actors, I will do some writing (Thelma was a prolific reader) and observe a moment or two of silence, during which I will try and imagine what “Rear Window” and “All About Eve” would have been like without her poignantly astringent presence. These are both challenging activities.

What does Thelma Ritter have to do with learning the cello? you ask. I really don’t know. What is there to say about the cello? It’s difficult. I screech. My bow thumb hurts. What else is new?

Thelma’s characters were never what one would call musically inclined. They were too busy to lift a saxaphone, whether sweeping, cooking, nursing, nurturing, sacrificing, tippling (every now and then) taking their kid to Macy’s to see Santa, massaging shut-in photographers, dressing Broadway divas, picking up after Doris Day and dispensing kitchen wisdom. The closest her screen roles came to musical endeavor was the time she had to watch admiringly from the sidelines while Susan Hayward pretended to be a vocalist.

Stage was a whole other story. During the ‘20s and the Depression, when she and her actor-husband Joseph Moran were struggling to get a toehold in the business, Thelma chirped and Charlestoned to every Sally, Irene and Nanette ever to tour in stock. In the ‘50s, when she had upgraded to salty maids and matrons, she appeared on Broadway as Marthy in “New Girl in Town,” a musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” that Hal Prince would later memorialize as “the one show I produced that made back its investment that didn’t deserve to.”

Thelma had two big numbers, which she delivered with a voice approximating Edith Piaf under water. She shared the Tony Award  with her co-star, Gwen Verdon who, a propos of nothing, was having horrific fights with the leading man. Onstage and off.  Gwen and Thelma got along gangbusters. During the run, they took turns coming down with the flu to prevent two understudies from having to go on at the same time and audience members from rushing the box office to turn in their tickets.

Thelma never won an Academy Award.  She wore a bracelet given to her by her husband, studded with tiny Oscars. Every time she lost, she would add another. By 1963, six little Oscars dangled from the bracelet.

I remember attending a dinner-screening party back in the mid-80s that Vito Russo threw for a few friends. He knew I was a big Thelma-phile, and had gotten his hands on a 16mm print of “Pickup on South Street.” Moe, the underworld go-between who lived in an SRO and sold secrets to the cops so that she could have a proper funeral and not end up in Potter’s Field. This was the one Oscar Thelma lost that she felt she really deserved. She was right about that.

Larry Kramer, another guest, walked out of the party before Thelma’s big death scene: Thelma on the bed, “Mam’selle” spinning on the phonograph, the offscreen gunshot. Larry Kramer is a very sympathetic man, but I will never forgive him that.

A year or two later, when he was exhausted and dissipated from illness, Vito came over to my apartment to watch “How the West Was Won.” We held hands like tweens at a pajama party and giggled helplessly as wagon-train driver Thelma mooned in vain over gambler Gregory Peck. Thelma could crack a mean horsewhip, but she never got the guy. She was never even a contender. Thelma lived to serve and support. Debbie Reynolds, wild west pioneer, bagged Peck instead.

Happy birthday, Thelma, and happy Valentine’s Day. Gregory Peck didn’t deserve you. Be mine.

Tim is excited.

Generally speaking, Tim is an excitable guy. Tim finds hidden caches of excitement in corners few others would bother to dust.

“I thought of you the other day,” he chirps at the beginning of lesson.

And what brought this on?

“I’m taking a conducting class. We’re working on the second movement of Beethoven’s 6^th.”

Very cool.

“Remember months ago when we talked about tempos, how differently one can interpret the marked tempo?”

Mm. I think so. Yes.

“The second movement is andante. But on the score, Beethoven calls for the andante to be played at 50!”

That’s pretty slow. Even for me.

“Yeah! And if you check the range for andante on a metronome, it’s-“

Much faster.

“Yeah! Let’s see.” Tim checks his metronome app. “75 to 110!”

Wild stuff.

“So there’s a lot of room for interpretation!”

Tim can always be counted upon to accelerate the tempo of lesson. I enter the room in a Beethoven-andante state of mind and walk out an hour later in a metronome-andante state of mind, punching and swinging like Jackie Chan.

Excitement pervades the house. Or, rather, anxiety. Somewhere, beyond the walls of Tim’s cramped lesson room, Roscoe bellows. As far as I can make out, these are not screams of merriness. No, this is anxiety. Most definitely. High anxiety.

I confide in Tim that Roscoe is in an unusually downbeat mood today.

“He’s testing the limits,” Tim explains. “What do they call it, the Terrible Twos? He’s entering that stage where he’s trying to see how far he can go.”

Doesn’t that stage go on, like, forever?

Tim doesn’t respond. Tim is still coked up on Beethoven. We talk a little more about the Pastoral, a discussion that segues organically into Disney’s “Fantasia” and then, somewhat more mysteriously, into Tim’s journey into martial arts. He points up behind him to a high shelf, off of which dangles a black belt.

I am sitting in a closet with a cellist who holds a black belt in karate. Words fail.

Roscoe’s wails crescendo from without, derailing our warm-up chat. I relax my cello. There are convincing signs that I will not be needing it for a while.

A knock at the door. Miranda pokes her head in. Roscoe’s small head follows below, his cheeks moistened from the kind of tragedy that only a 15-month-old can know.

“Can you watch him for a few moments? We’re having a diaper disaster.”

Tim lifts his son onto his lap, asking him if he would like to hear Jan play.

Roscoe eyes me warily. I make a funny face. He shows sudden interest.

I open to a Bach minuet and lift my bow.  What good fortune. Only nine months at this, and already my audience has doubled.

——————————————

Friends want to know why there are such long stretches between blog entries. I ask myself this very question nearly once a day day.

One reason I’ve come up with, thanks to many, many hours of therapy, is some combination of false humility and self-sabotage: the who-really-cares? factor. Who really cares about my trials and tribulations with a stringed instrument? Who wants to know?

Another excuse, perhaps, is that old devil writer’s block. Long bouts of inactivity put one in distinguished literary company, no?

A third and most likely factor is the increasing desire to stay concentrated on the practice and the process: fling myself fully and wholeheartedly into the doing, as opposed to the observing and analyzing. A desire to not turn into the tourist whose experience of Tibet is mediated entirely through the screen of his I-Phone camera.

But then weeks go by and I begin to regret having let all those images go by the wayside. I should have my very own baby photo album, one that preserves each and every stage of development: crawling, standing up, falling down, getting back up again, walking forward, cycling ahead. Who really cares? I suppose I do.

This is, indeed, a critical stage. Tim is attempting to wean me off the training wheels of Suzuki’s number system and set me on the path of identifying the notes.  His method? A spoonful of sugar. Take favorite pop songs and figure out a bass line for them. Put the recording on and accompany it, first using sustained whole notes taken from the chord at hand and then, after a week or two, implementing those root notes to write and play a somehwat more sophisticated underscoring.

In my initial weeks YouTubing the Gary Jules cover of “Mad World,” the method tastes more vinegary than sweet. Tim  first combs the recording and establishes the chords and root notes of each measure, then writes them in on an empty sheet of staff paper. Back home, I contemplate this elementary notation and stare at the page in a state of utter helplessness. It feels to me as if the boat has been prematurely unmoored and I have been set recklessly adrift without the first notion of how to mount the sails. What in my skill sets acquired up to this point am I supposed to consult in order to determine what the notes are and and how to locate them on my strings? My knowledge of notes from scale practice seeems woefully insufficient. Is this my fault? Should I have been more diligent? Or has Tim, as I begin to suspect, omitted a very important step. In short order, my befuddlement turns to irritation.

Six weeks of listening to Gary Jules singing “Mad World” could drive even the most even-tempered of souls to suicide. So I am most grateful when Tim decides, at the very moment I am beginning to see the light, that it is time to move on. For our next foray into pop, I choose Harry Warren and Mack Gordon’s “The More I See You,” the creamiest of ballads and about as far from the nihilistic posturings of “Mad World” as one can travel. After pondering available covers on YouTube by Sarah Vaughan (too complicated), Julie London (too vampy), Frank Sinatra (too lounge-lizardy) and June Christy (close-but-no-cigar), I decide on a gooey, 1001-strings arrangement featuring Nat King Cole, who comes the closest of any of these vocalists to serving the song straight-up.

There is something to be said for the soldiering-on discipline of repetition: at some point, when practice has become so monotonous you can feel your bones ossify and splinter into fine bread crumbs, something kicks in. You have your “Rain in Spain” moment. By George, you’ve got it.

Over the course of the Christmas-New Year holidays, I dart back and forth between Bach’s ditsy Minuet #3 and a meat-and-potatoes underscoring of “The More I See You” that Tim has hashed out. Over and over. And over. And over again. After two weeks, my diligence is rewarded: the elements of the two disparate pieces begin to cohere in tandem, as if by mutual consent. Is it possible that, after my despairing wrestling matches with second position in the Bach 2^nd Minuet, that I am emerging the victor? The leaps between first and second position in the 3^rd Minutet seem considerably less onerous, and, as long as I maintain a deliberate, unhurried tempo, I can muddle through capably to the last note and even achieve something that resembles good tone.

By the same token, the mist of confusion that engulfed my attempts at the Tears for Fears song begins to lift with “The More I See You.” I am not quite “reading” music yet, but I am starting to make connections between the placement of my fingers on the neck and the notations on the page.

The well-being that follows from an awareness of progress is infectious. Even Cannobio, the house African Grey parrot, feels the joy. There was a time, just a few months back, when she would begin screeching the moment my cello popped out of the case, then beat a panicky retreat behind a cabinet door on the far end of the room. During Thursday’s practice hour, as I sawed away at the Minuet #3, she climbed up the back of my chair, rested her claws on my shoulder and listened with, dare I project, rapt intensity.

The thing about parrots, though, is that they make a lot of noise but you can never be entirely sure what they’re thinking. So, either my captive audience is exhibiting symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, or else I have the beginnings of a fan base.

1 – The New York Times ran a piece in the Health section, a series of soundbytes from centenarians sharing their secrets on how to live to be 100.  “There’s no secret about it, really,” confided one Hazel Miller.  “You just don’t die, and you get to be 100.”  I forwarded this article to my sister on the day of midterm elections, in response to a moving YouTube clip she had mailed me about the oldest living Holocaust survivor, a 106-year-old pianist who pulled herself and her young son through Thereisenstadt on the coattails of Chopin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlccsLr48Mw). A friend of hers, a fellow Thereisenstadt survivor, recounted in the video how playing the cello saved her life: as long as the Nazis needed a camp orchestra for propaganda purposes, she would avoid the  extermination list.

2 – Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer,” a gymnastic little number  that would be appropriated by Harold Arlen and his orchestrators for their “Wizard of Oz” underscoring, becomes my bete noir for the better part of two months. Tim advises, as always, to take it as slow as possible. But the roller-coaster surge of the melody invariably throws the brakes out halfway, sending me dashing and careening through the second half till the front car hits a wall in the final bars and I go flying into the next county. My farmer so wants to be happy, but in truth he is bi-polar.

3 –  Enough with the Suzuki Book romper-room stuff. One sticky July day, I inform  Tim that I’m ready to take it to the next level. I’m not quite sure what the next level is, but Tim seems receptive. He tosses out the day’s lesson plan and takes out a sheet of paper. He writes “Fred Church Goes Down and Eats Beans.” Who is Fred? “This is one of those dumb mottos we make up in music school to help us remember things,” says Tim. Ah. We’re having our doe-a-deer moment. And what does Fred help us remember? How to determine the number and letters of the sharps contained within the major scales. Once at home, Fred and his eating preferences get the deep six with a Brooklyn makeover: Frank Capra Gets Deli and Eats Bagels. This I can remember. I practice the C and G scales. No sharps, and F sharp, respectively.

4 -  My lower back is down and out, seven weeks and counting. Pain governs the day; muscle relaxers, Vicodin and heating pad, the night. How ancient and befuddled one feels when tying shoelaces and pulling on undershorts becomes a series of strategums. The cello has become, if not an enemy, a hostile agent. Pillows are now de rigeur for lesson and practice. When I explain my dilemma to Dr. N, a very excitable rheumatologist with a love of music, she responds philosophically. “Well, yes, cello practice may not be the best thing for your condition, but you have to balance that with the extent to which it takes your mind off your discomfort.”

5 -  Now that I have switched  my lesson hour from Monday at 4 to Wednesday at 3, my schedule coincides with the mid-afternoon return of Tim’s wife Miranda and their year-old son Roscoe, who can be heard  bellowing with Wagnerian intensity through the kitchen walls. Roscoe, Tim tells me with pride, is taking his first steps. The chaos of his initiation into bipedal motion is reflected in the occasional interludes of tears and wailing. Generally speaking, though, Roscoe is an upbeat child, and I appreciate the boisterous validation of my own fallings-down and pickings-back-up that he brings to the table.

6 – Roscoe is not the only voice of youth to share in the wonder of my musical flailing. One day, mid-lesson, there is a knock at the door. Miranda pushes Scott into the room, saying she needs to go out momentarily and would we mind looking after him for a few minutes? Scott is somebody’s nephew. 3 or 4 years of age. Cute as button. Tim introduces me to Scott and asks him if he will be able sit quietly and listen to the lesson. Scott thinks about this a moment and grunts in the affirmative. He manages for a minute or so, but soon caves to restlessness. Poking around in a corner, he comes upon one of Tim’s guitars and, as I am launching into “The Happy Farmer,” he begins plucking the strings.  Tim removes the offending guitar and gently chides Scott, telling him he needs to chill. But Scott is a little rascal. I begin the piece again and Scott, deprived of his instrument, drums on the base of my music stand. Tim repremands once again, upping the ante. Scott is not having it. The power struggle continues, until finally Scott is asked to stand at the door. I can feel the heat of Scott’s resentful glowers at my back. It occurs to me that Tim may well have been like this at Scott’s age.

7 –  At the end of a lesson, Tim asks me to come in next week with the names of five pop songs I really like. I give this assignment a great deal of thought over the coming days, sifting through 50 years of music played on ever-evolving listening devices at various speeds (78, 45, 33 1/3, portable record changer, monoral console,  portable stereo record changer, stereo unit with separate tuner and big speakers, stereo unit with built-in tuner and discreet speakers, cassette player, DVD, Itunes). When Wednesday rolls around, I come armed with my list:  “Mad World,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” “The More I See You,” Rudy Vallee’s “Deep Night” and “Alfie.” Tim looks perplexed at the titles, but for the Beatles (“that was our wedding song”).  He asks me which one I prefer, and I choose “Mad World.” Tim scours the Web. The Gary Jules cover, I say, not the Tears for Fears. The live in-concert version, I quickly add, not the video. Within seconds, he finds Gary Jules live (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Nq086QB1Q&feature=related} and bookmarks it. “Now,” he announces with a fl0urish, “We are going to learn how to play it.”

8 – Tim and I are bonding. Each week, more extraneous personal information is divulged during the chatty, warm-up minutes,which stretch in duration from one lesson to the next. We both have lousy backs.  He’s a liberal, I’m a liberal. His in-laws live in Connecticut. Mine in Germany. He seems to be getting into “Mad World.” One week, he plays me a  cover of the song that I had not heard before, a strange and smoky rendition sung by a female vocalist of elusive identiy. He plays the guess-who card for a calculated moment or two before revealing, triumphantly, “It’s Renee Fleming!” This past week, he shares his frustrations trying to organize a rock concert with six bands; one of the musicians is playing the diva and refuses to be pinned down. (“This is why producers get paid a lot of money,” I offer, and we bounce excited nods back and forth, as if we’ve collaboratively uncovered a profound human truth). With the intimacy comes a physical looseness that frees up the lesson, giving him the comfort and permission he needs to manipulate my arms and fingers, puppetmaster-style, as he tries to inculcate greater finesse with the bow. It must be a hairy eggshell-walk for a music teacher, this business of negotiating a comfort zone of show and touch with each student.

9 – When I Google “cello,” I come upon any number of cello blogs. God, we are a dull breed. This realization puts me off writing another blog entry for several months after my close encounter with a stolen instrument. So, learning second position is like having root canal work. Does anyone care?

10  – Learning second position is worse than root canal. It is a spinal tap. On a Bach minuet, Tim has me me insert a glissando and an exaggerated rolling forward of the left shoulder as I slide up from first  to second position; then, a few notes later, a rolling back of the shoulder and a glissando to help me slide back  down from second position to first. We spend the entire hour on this one move. He tells me not to think about it, just do it. But I can’t not think about it. My body stages a rebellion: when I pull back the bow with my right arm to execute the glissando, my left shoulder responds by cranking down and under rather than up and over. I practice these transitional bars over and over for days to come before the two arms begin to show signs of independence. Five days and several hundred bitter, heavy sighs later,  the second position appears on the distant horizon. This is grueling. A spinal tap. But you know what? I’m playing Bach.

The morning I brought the Andrew Bednarski cello into the police, I tuned it up and practiced on it one more time.

I had a strong suspicion it would not be returning home with me. I needed to inhabit that warm sound for one more hour: release it into the room and let it sink into the walls. I was feeling a bit like that little boy in “The White Ribbon,” the pastor’s son who had rescued an injured bird and was given permission by his father to keep it for as long as it would take to nurse it back to health, with the understanding that he would have to eventually return it to its proper place in the wild.

The intrument had only been a part of the landscape for a brief, tense weekend, during which I argued with my better sense and bargained with my conscience. From the moment I had first read the crime watch report about the heist in Brookline, however, I knew in my heart what needed to be done.

Still.

I had spent the better part of Saturday and Sunday churning over the likely fate of Bridget, who had morphed in my mind from a beleagured mom juggling debts, raising a daughter and moving homes to a deeply troubled woman with a rap sheet and, from all appearances, a drug habit.

Why should it matter to me? As the detective in town would remind me the next day, I was victimized along with the folks who had their house broken into in the spring. I had been lied to. I had been played. I was $500 poorer.

And I have known on many other occasions in the past what it is like to have person and home violated, to see my stuff unceremoniously relocated to an unknown location. Like the couple in Brookline, I had myself once returned home from a vacation to find my apartment raided and personal effects removed, most upsettingly (not to say inexplicably) a favorite framed photograph of my then-infant niece and nephew. Let’s not forget that evening, while watching the sunset with a date on a West Village pier, we were held at knifepoint by a couple of wound-up crackheads; or the time I was left lying unconscious on a street in Barcelona, choked by muggers in broad daylight for a wallet that would reward the takers with a few pesetas and an AmEx receipt for two terrycloth bathrobes.

And yet.

Something happens when you have spent an hour or so with a person you are about to finger to the police.  Something shifts.

You recall the casual grace note in an email Bridget had sent, the one where she apologized for not getting back sooner and expressed the wish that you were enjoying the glorious spring day. You think about the stray biographical details you found through Google, the ones describing her master’s degree in education and her good works with inner-city children. You wonder about the daughter who is going to have to go back to school every day owning the damage of her mother’s errors in judgment. You wonder how and why the worm turned. You play out little dramas in your head, scenes of weeping, regret, rage.

You think about your own moment of malfeasance in college, your personal rush course in Miranda rights and bail bonds.

I had no idea what role in a breaking-and-entering job Bridget shared, if any, or if she was merely acting as a fence for stolen goods. This did not strike me as someone who would pull up to a locked house in the dead of night with a U-Haul, monkey with the burglar alarm and roll out the front door with a big-screen TV  and a small museum of antique instruments on a hand truck.  But if the cello was indeed the same one among several choice items that had been appropriated from a couple in suburban Boston, things would probably not go well for her.

So, you do what you have to do. You go to the police. But you pause first. You consider. You take a deep breath.

The local police sergeant was a courtly, boyish guy with a guarded smile, darkly tented eyes and the contained build of a college quarterback: A shrink-wrapped Treat Williams. Exceedingly polite, bordering on deferential. A good fellow. He introduced himself as Dan.

Sgt. Dan excused himself from a visiting inspector to hear out my story, which I enhanced with a printout of the Brookline crime watch report and the entire Gmail exchange leading to the purchase. “It’s a very good thing you came in,” he said when I was done. “The last thing you want is to be found in possession of stolen property.”

Validation. I scarfed it down like I hadn’t had anything to eat all weekend.

After scanning the evidence,  Sgt. Dan asked me to get the instrument out of the car and  place it upright on a bench in a side room,  the holding pen for recalcitrant locals. He then brought in a camera and photographed it from several angles. The cello looked forlorn, prone, submitting to mug shots. I imagined it handcuffed at the neck to the bench, phoning for a parent or legal counsel. What had it done to deserve this ignominy?

After I reprised my narrative in its entirety, Sgt. Dan pulled a form from a drawer and asked me if I could write out everything I had just said. Then, almost apologetically, he said it would be best if I left the cello behind for information gathering. He gave me a sad look that told me he knew how big a thing this was to have to do.

The following morning, I dropped the written testimony off at the station, then headed over to the mall for a compensatory sprint through Target, Whole Foods and Stop & Shop. En route home, the cell phone rang. It was Sgt. Dan.

“Mr. Stuart? Well, things have taken a turn. It looks as if the cello is a match.”

I could tell from his voice that it would be a good thing if I swung around to the station right away. When I arrived, Sgt. Dan was commiserating with an off-duty colleague, an affable, well-fed gentleman in tee shirt and Bermuda shorts. I took a chair between them.

Sgt. Dan spoke. “The A—— police are now working with the Brookline police on the case. It looks as if all three cellos were part of the stolen goods. They would like you come in and identify the house where you made the purchase.”  I did a quick mental calculation of how many precincts were now tied up with Andrew Bednarski cello. (Three). This was big.

“We were wondering,” he said, continuing with caution, “how you would feel about going back to the house of the  woman who sold you the cello to purchase another one?”

I forwarded this notion to my brain, which texted back noisily, buzzing and screeching like one of those city auto alarms that exhaust an extended repertory of extraterrstrial sounds before abandoning you to recover your shattered nerves in silence.

When the commotion subsided, I entered into a short but meaningful conversation with myself.

Am I hearing this correctly, Jan? They want me to be the front man in a sting operation?  Yes Jan, that sounds right.  They want you to go the extra mile. They are testing your mettle. Are you up to it? No, I’m really not up to it. Much as I hate to disappoint you. Please try not to be too hard on me. I have a dearth of mettle.

Sgt. Dan and Bermuda shorts sat atop their desks, bearing down on me with encouraging half-smiles. Time to draw the line.

“Well, I think that may fall outside my comfort zone,” I said. Or words to that effect.

They were expecting this. “We’ll figure something out,” says Sgt. Dan, keeping me in the game.

I jumped into my Matrix and followed Sgt. Dan in his squad car into town, parking in front of the red brick police precinct on Main Street. As we entered the building, he confided that the owner of the stolen instruments was an elderly physician, a collector, who had fallen into a deep depression after the theft. The information made me oddly uncomfortable.

Inside, we were greeted by Detective T. I could tell from the squeeze of his hand that he was a seasoned hardhead. Smooth, but sturdy: Dirty Harry as played by Richard Widmark.

Detective T repeated the sting strategy to me, fire in his eyes. Picking up on my reluctance, he demurred, asking if perhaps instead they could have one of their people go in and introduce themselves as a relative of mine.

“Even better, they could say they were a fellow student in my cello class,” I offered in kind, slightly disturbed at my own enthusiasm. They seemed to like this idea.

Detective T and Sgt. Dan led me down a hallway and to a parking lot in the back, stopping at a grey sedan. I got into the front,  Dectective T took the wheel. Sgt. Dan sat in back, most quietly.

The day was growing cloudier and weirder.  I was riding in an unmarked police car, returning to the scene.

We drove to the house in silence, muted by the weight of mission and the vague discomfort felt by strangers penned up in a car together. When we arrived, it looked frail and defeated. I thought of Bridget standing out front just days before, waving my car over and smiling.

Detective T signalled the office and asked them to check on the ownership of the house. He then turned the car around and headed back down the road, pointing out the house where Bridget and her family presently lived. Folks were home. Two cars sat in front. In a day or so, I figured, there would be one or two more.

As we drove back into town, I  was struck by the utter lack of sentimentality with which Detective T conducted his business. He does this day in and day out, I thought. Running checks on suspicious houses. Honing in on people who have made bad choices. Driving into the thick of unpleasantness.

This moved me very deeply. When the detective dropped me off at my car and walked back into the station with Sgt. Dan,   they said they would do what they could do get my money back. I thanked them both, and the sheer rawness of my gratitude caught me off guard.

The following morning, the clouds gave way to a light drizzle. It was time to start cleaning the house and packing for a trip to Europe. But I felt inert. It had been a draining and lonely couple of days.  I needed succor.

I got in the car and headed over to the library, making a bee-line for the comfort-food: the children’s video section. The spines of all the movies were worn down to the point of illegibility, as if they had been savaged by an invading tribe and  thrown back on the shelves.  I pored over the films for nearly a half hour, testing my mood to determine whether this was Miyazaki day or a “Babes in Toyland” day. I finally settled on “The Parent Trap” and “The Muppet Movie.” The librarian gave my choices a big thumbs up. I basked in her approval.

The rain began to gather steam as I moseyed home, accelerating from a trickle to a resolute drumbeat. The road was deserted. There were no cars in sight, other than the now-familiar white and blue outline of a local police SUV, catapulting  in the opposite direction. The SUV zoomed by, presumably headed toward the precinct. Something must be cooking. Business was obviously picking up.

Taking a right, I glanced in my rear view mirror and noticed that I suddenly had company. The police car that had passed me a moment ago had executed a breakneck U-turn and was now bearing down on my Matrix, blue lights flashing. Damn, this is for me. I could feel my entire body compress and deflate. I pulled over, keeping a tense eye on the rear view mirror.

Instinctively, I affixed my hands to the steering wheel. All I could think was, Crap, I’ve been pulled over by a cop, and a Hayley Mills video is lying flat out on the shotgun seat.

The policeman sidled up to the window. It was Sgt. Dan. Breathless.

“Oh, Mr. Stuart, I was hoping that was you,” he said with a  a sheepish smile. “Sorry to pull you over. We’ve got a search warrant, and we’re about to move in. Detective T. had a couple more questions he hoped you could answer now.”

Sgt. Dan stood in the rain, looking excited and wet. I felt a twinge of affection.

“Does he want me to come in?”

“No. I can relay your answers. Very quickly, do you know if Bridget signed the check you gave her? And how did you find out about her previous arrest?”

Yes, you can see the signature on the bank website. Google search engine.

“Great. Thank you sir.”

I wished him good luck, vowing to myself that I would never utter an inclement word about the police again.

I was in New York City a few days later, gathering things together for the trip when the cell phone rang.

“Good morning Mr. Stuart. It’s Dan. I know you’re going to be taking off soon. But I wanted to catch you before you left to let you know that we’ve got your money back.”

Like most refunds, it would arrive after an extended delay. The trip to visit Matthias’ family in Germany, with roundabout detours to Portugal and Lago Maggiore, couldn’t have happened along at a better moment.  After the events of recent days, I was gunning to take a break from sedentary New England villages where nothing ever happens. And, thanks to Matthias’ mother, who had pulled a rabbit or two out of her hat to locate a temporary cello for me while in Europe, I could quickly redirect my spent energies back into practice.

The rabbit came in the person of Matthias’ godfather in Stuttgart, Wolfgang, a gregarious career attorney and avocational musician who had generously agreed to loan me his son Kai’s cello, with a free at-home lesson thrown in at no-extra cost. Wolfgang’s instructional methodology involved the pre-consumption of copious quantities of (excellent) local Riesling and a private performance of Bach’s first Cello Suite, activities which managed to use up most of the alloted lesson period. Kai’s cello was of relatively recent Italian vintage; the timbre lacked the richness of my lamented Bednarski, but it was a solid instrument and more than adequate for pacifying the extended family of spiders and snakes in residence at the house in Lago Maggiore.

When we returned from Europe three weeks later, Sgt. Dan pulled up the driveway in his blue-and-white SUV, a money order for $500 in hand. They had coaxed it out of Bridget, he explained, telling her that things would go easier for her if she cooperated and provided information. She was apparently very contrite and conceded she had made a lot of mistakes.

And what about the two other stolen cellos?

“They were never found,” he replied with a punctuation mark of disappointment that seemed to indicate this was as much as he was prepared to say. Sgt. Dan thanked me again, climbed into his SUV and backed it out of the driveway.

[Note from a wary writer: The following blog entry was written a month ago, but for reasons which should eventually become apparent to a patient reader was not suitable for publishing at that time]

“Cello $700 Beautiful cello for sale. If interested call 413-xxx-xxxx.”

The listing on Craig’s List is straightforward, no-nonsense. No wistful testaments to the owner’s fabled history with the instrument. No arduous defense of the decision to trade up. Nothing personal. Good cello. Need cash.

$700. Hmm. A little over my budget, but as prices for student cellos go, still in the ball park. Probably one of those penny-bright, Chinese assembly-line toys with the faux European monikers. Like my rentals: squeaks, but shines.  I can live with this. Maybe I can get them down to $550.

The ad appears on May 17. I hit the reply link on the 18th. “Very interested. Do you know the make? Is the price negotiable?”

The day passes. Night falls. No answer.

I’ll wait a few more days. Nobody gets back right away in Western Massachusetts. The plumbers. The contractors. The medical clinics. The wood delivery people. Three calls over two weeks before you hear back from anyone, if you’re blessed. And if you’ve left two or three follow-up messages. New Englanders want to be wooed.

Three days. Still waiting. Perhaps they got a buyer already. But the ad is still running. Why didn’t they remove the ad? Keeping their options open, no doubt. The Craig’s List clientele can occasionally be, um, insincere. The ones who are not merely psychopaths.

Five days. Still no answer. Perhaps they’re just very busy. A professional musician. A university professor buried under a mound of final papers. Did I put them off with the negotiable question? They think I’m  a jerk. But really: An ad on Craig’s List, and there’s no wiggle room?

After a week, a reply finally arrives. “Hi Jan, Sorry to take so long to respond, wrapping up end of the semester stress.” (Aha. I nailed it. Those academics, what can you do?). I read on. “I have two full sized cellos one is an Andrew Bednarski which I’d be willing to sell for $500 and it doesn’t have a case. The other is Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonenfis and that is $700 with a soft case. I can take pics and send them or we can arrange a time to meet if you are still interested. Thanks, Al.”

I’ve pursued so many leads for cellos on Craig’s List that it all seems very business as usual. It doesn’t occur to me, at least from the get-go, to question why a Stradiuarius is selling for $700. I’m not a stickler for editorial detail, so I neglect to catch that the sender’s sign-off, Al, is different from the sender’s name posted at the top, John Bridget. And even if I did notice, what of it? Everyone veils themselves on the Internet. As well they should.

I write back, distractedly addressing the letter to John rather than Al. In a day or so, I will wonder why it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that I will get another letter back, signed “Bridget, John’s wife.” Bridget wants to set up a time to see her cellos. Or her husband’s cellos. They are one of those merged couples with the binary email addresses.

Who is Al: John or Bridget? Must be Bridget. Women have more reason to fudge gender in public ads. Keeps the Norman Bates’ at bay, yes?

I get Bridget on the phone. I agree to see her at 11:30 on Friday. She gives me tortured directions to the house, which I scratch, along with address, on a small piece of paper. 102 W. ———- Street..

I set off on the big morning,  flush with expectations. Driving through town, I realize I will be a few minutes early, so I pull over to pick up a newspaper, leaving my cell behind in the car. When I return, a message awaits in the inbox. It’s Bridget, asking me if I would please meet her at a different address than the one she had first given me. “We’re in the middle of moving,” Bridget explains in a slightly woozy voice. “It’s just a few blocks away from the old house.”

I pull away from town and the cell rings. Bridget. Concerned. Did I get the message? Did I understand the directions? Yes and sort of.

As I approach the revised destination, the neighborhood comes into shape:  a motley collection of modest ranch homes, bicycles lying lazily on the grass,  brightly-colored plastic toys and go-karts spilling from open garages. Bridget stands before the driveway of a plain, gray cottage, waving me down. She is a pleasant seeming woman in her 30s; her appearance, but for a hair-lippish quirk about the mouth, is as nondescript as her home-to-be.

It is 11:30, and Bridget seems harried. And why not? She is in the middle of moving, after all, and, as she further explains, she has to be at the high school in a couple of hours to help her daughter in a school play. “The A——- Regional school system is such a good one,” she says over her shoulder, leading me to the door. “So I’ve been told,” I reply, only half-noticing that the garage is markedly free of moving boxes.

Bridget leads me through the dark, empty house to a bedroom where three cellos have been set up on the floor. (Three? First there was one beautiful cello. Then two. Now three). Bridget has set up a chair for me by the window. One is shiny and blondish, its strings unstrung and flopping loosely over the bridge. This must be the bargain, the Chinese hack job for $500.  The second is seemingly older, a handsome instrument of richly burnished (cherry?) wood that, like its owner, bears a signifying blemish  on its face. This must be the $700 one. The third is the most beautiful of the three, a ¾ or ½ size cello with a voluptuous antique walnut. But it’s too small, what a drag.

I drift immediately to the cherry one. I sit, pull out my  little tuning box and attempt a D scale. It is wildly sharp. The needle jumps to the far right of the tuning box screen, disapprovingly. As I adjust the fine tuners below the bridge, Bridget fumbles with the strings on the lighter colored cello, trying her best to thread them over the pegs. She knew I was coming, why is she first dealing with this now? She admits that she is not a cellist, explaining that she had studied music vocal in college and had taken a basic course in string instrument assembling. Or something like that.

As she labors with the strings, she remarks off-handedly that the cellos belonged to her  aunt, who has recently died.

“Oh,” I say with genuine interest. “Did she play in an ensemble or orchestra?”

“No.” Bridget dithers with a peg, trying to decide which way to turn it. “She just enjoyed playing the cello, for herself.”

After wrestling with the fine tuners for a few minutes, I attempt a little Bach march I have been tooling around with for the last month. The sound is deep, dimensional, free of wolf tones. Does this woman know what she is selling? This is far more fabulous than anything I could have expected for the money. I could do worse. Surely. And for $500 or $700, I probably couldn’t do better.

“You can see the labels inside,” said Bridget, who is becoming a little rattled restringing the blond cello. “That one is an ‘Andrew Benarski. Bednarski?” This one is a—“  She squints into an F-hole of the one she is holding and reads “An-to-nee-us Stradi-var—-.” She halts, mid-surname. “That can’t be a Stradiavrius.”

I’m confused. Didn’t she say so in the emaill? Is she having doubts? Or is this supposed to be bait: a little soft shoe from the souk merchant?  Bridget resumes stringing, emitting flustered noises. I am getting the feeling that she just wants me to look at the two cellos, choose one and go.  The school play is calling. I volunteer, “You know, we can do this on another day, when you have more time.”

Bridget mutters that we may have to, and continues.  A string snaps, flying up toward her face. This is getting dire.

As I reach down to retrieve the string, I notice there are no fine-tuners below the bridge. Not promising. When I point this out, Bridget stops what she is doing, grabs the ¾ cello (which does have fine tuner knobs), and compares the size of the tailpieces to see if they can be switched. Surprisingly, they are a match. Grabbing the  small cello, she removes the tailpiece with its fine tuners intact, swiftly and without a trace of sentimentality. As it sits there, dunuded  and forlorn, she transfers the tailpiece to  the blond cello and begins the task of restringing it one more time. Somewhere, I can only presume, there is an urn where Auntie’s ashes are shifting in horror.

I pick up the Bednarski again and vamp a few more times with the Bach march. After a few more minutes, she hands me the haphazardly reassembled instrument. I draw the bow across the A string, keeping an eye on the tuning box. The pitch is so off the map, the indicator doesn’t know whether to flee to the left or the right.

I glance at my watch. Almost an hour has passed. This is taking much too long. I feel as if I had been in this dark little room for three days. How strange that she and her husband had not prepared the instruments in advance; do they really expect anyone to buy the “Stradiuarius” in its present condition? After several collaboritve efforts to tune it come a cropper, I suggest to Bridget that she go back to her moving work and I will try to adjust the tuning myself. Maybe I should just buy the Benarski and go.

She agrees, tentatively, leaving the room. A few minutes later, she returns. “Are you having any luck?: I bow the A string of the can’t-possibly-be-a-Strad,  then the D. The tuning needle winces. “It sounds kind of wobbly,’ I reply.

“Which cello sounds better to you? “ she counters, half-hearing.  I can feel her pressing for a decision. But I haven’t even tested the second one.

I turn a tuning peg a notch, then another. Suddenly, there is an ominous cracking sound from below. I look down. The bridge has collapsed and shattered into pieces.

We gasp, in unison, the sound of disbelief made whole.

I can almost feel my blood freeze. I am mortified. Maybe a wee bit irritated. But really mortified.  I calculate in my head how much doing the right thing will cost me.

When I  insist I will pay for a new bridge, Bridget rejects the offer.  “No, absolutely not. “ We stand there looking at the broken bridge parts, which sit in a sad heap like an unwanted jigsaw puzzle..

“Really. Don’t worry about it,” she insists, sounding a note of quiet desperation.  “Which one would you like?”

So this is how I will finally buy a used cello.  I ask which one is $500 and which is $700.

“You can have either of them for $500, with the case.” She wants the money. She wants me out of there.

“Will you take a check? I’m good for it. You can trust me.”

“Trust, yes,” Bridget says with an ambiguous sigh. “We all really need to trust one another.”

I write a check for $500 to Bridget Morehouse, take the Bednarski and wish her luck with the move.  As I drive home, I ponder how much I should send her for a replacement bridge.

So, I own my own cello. A lovely cello. I want to feel elated, but the whole experience has been messy and deflating.

Once I return to the house, I pull out my new purchase and peer again through the F hole at the label. Printed in small letters below “Andrew Bednarski,” are the words “William Harris Lee, cello workshop Chicago. 1995.”  I open the bow envelope in the cello case and find two bow protectors. I shoot an email to Bridget, telling her I was given an extra bow case and that I would be happy to drop it off in the next few days.

No response. Bridget wants nothing more to do with me.

A moment passes. A frisson of weirdness shoots through my body. Something is off here.

I get into search position at my MacBook and Google “Andrew Bednarski.” A couple of links come up. He is an actor in a Canadian TV series called “Katts and Dog.” He is the author of a book titled

“Holding Egypt: Tracing The Reception Of The Description De L’Egypte In Nineteenth-Century Great Britain.”

I try again. I Google “William Harris Lee cello workshop” and come upon “William Harris Lee & Co.”  Top-drawer website, checkered with photos of serious violins. A class act. “William Harris Lee & Co. has established a reputation for making the finest-sounding, most affordable hand-crafted violins, violas, cellos, and basses in the United States.” The cellos on sale range in price from $1750 to $8500. Nice.

I Google one more time and find one 1992 William Harris Lee cello being offered by a seller for $5,500 and a 2000 model being sold for $15,000. I am having an Antiques Roadshow moment. Maybe I have stumbled upon a little jewel, direct from auntie’s attic. I’ve done well for myself. Very well. Possibly too well.

I start to feel a little antsy. I am having a flashback to my conversation months back with the sales clerk at the Lincoln Center music shop, when we talked about the black market for stolen instruments. Could it be possible? Have I bought a hot cello?

I run my suspicions by Matthias and he laughs. Jan. You bought a cello on Craig’s List. What should I expect?

Back to Google. I enter the name “Bridget Morehouse.” I find an old news item from the local paper which lists her as a graduate of A——– High School, with a masters in education from the Universtity of Massachusetts. Good for her.

My eye wanders to the next listing. DailyGazettenet, “January 2010: Bridget Morehouse, 102 W——– Road,  was arrested Monday about 1 p.m., on an arrest warrant issued by the Eastern Hampshire District Court where she was later charged with 12 counts of uttering a false prescription. Police said Morehouse used forged prescriptions to obtain narcotics.”

Oh. Shit.

I check my on-line bank statement. My check for $500 has cleared the bank.

I reflect upon the chain of events: the first belated email from the pseudonymous Al, the empty house with no electricity, the dead aunt, the rushed sale. With the benefit of hindsight, everything smells.

At a friend’s dinner party that evening, my anxieties are met with  semi-amusement by our host, who seems reasonably appalled that I had bought the cello first and done my research after. He implies that my suspicions and snooping are a vestige of my New York City self . “We don’t do that here in Massachusetts. We accept things as we find them. We just say, “Oh, whatever, it’s fine.’

His word to the wise: “Rewind the tape. Go back to where you started. You didn’t look up anything, you didn’t uncover anything.”

Perhaps he’s right. I need to let it go. It’s fine. I have a beautiful cello.

In the morning, I open my email. The empty Google search box  nags at me, hungry for breakfast. I am incorrigible.  What haven’t I checked out?

I feed it a new combination. “Andrew Bednarski cellos.”

A link for violinhunters.com mentions a Polish violin maker  in an alphabetical listing of distinguished luthiers.

Above this link, I spot this entry:

Crimewatch: Brookline, Massachusetts.”

I click the link: A website for “Wicked Local Brookline,” featuring  news from the Brookline daily rag. I scroll down:

“Home break-in

On March 4, police responded to S……. Road for a reported past breaking and entering of a residence. The victim said he and his wife left for a trip on Feb. 11 and returned home March 3 at approximately 11 p.m. to find their house burglarized. Missing from the residence were a black Toshiba flat-screen television, a black HP laptop computer, cash, coins, a Peter Wamsley cello (circa 1740), an Andrew Bednarski cello (circa 1995), two cello bows and cases, a student cello with accompanying bow and case, a Hans Schrimer violin from Adorf, Germany, a violin bow stamped A. Lamy Au Paris and a violin case.”

I read the crime watch report five times. Bridget still hasn’t responded to me regarding the extra cello bow case.

Case closed.

Or case opened?

“Be not afraid of growing slowly.

Be afraid only of standing still.”

— Chinese proverb

Time out.

Professor Tim has taken off to Europe on vacation. My Eastman cello, the sand running down on its three-month contract, has returned to its home at Rayburn’s across from Lincoln Center. Tomorrow, I will pick up a new rental in Amherst. Three weeks without lessons, two days without practice. Ready. Set. Exhale.

At the start of my respite, Matthias and I reencountered “The Class,” Laurent Cantet’s lovely and amazing anatomy of a public school teacher and his junior high students. When I first saw it last year, I connected with the instructor, vicariously, through Matthias: The pedagogic tightrope walk of the enlightended teacher, forever negotiating the balance between the need to exude authority and a desire to be with-it and approachable. The daily struggle to stay on message amid the students’ bumptious, inexhaustible attempts to knock you off course. On this viewing, I found myself more sensitized to the balancing act of the students, who have to make themselves vulnerable to the teacher’s power and expertise without ceding their identity, their own point of view, or their position of respect in the group.

More than anything else in the film, I was done in by the student with downcast eyes who approaches the teacher as the class is emptying out for summer vacation. After listening in silence to her classmates’ buoyant summaries of what they learned over the school year, she tells him in a voice more despairing then accusatory, I didn’t learn anything. The whole year. I didn’t come away with a thing. I didn’t understand a thing.

I have known this dark, execrable feeling in and out of the classroom more times than I care to count–who hasn’t? Everone around you is percolating with the challenge of a new concept, buzzed by the argument, the processing, the sheer kick that comes with being in on it all. Everyone is contributing, lobbing ideas back and forth. Everyone’s getting it. You’re standing outside the sandbox looking in as everyone is filling their pails. Collecting. Sifting. Sharing. All you have to do is step over the wooden frame and join the play, but you can’t even locate the way in.

I’ve refamiliarized myself with this black place over the last couple of weeks in my practice sessions. Days go by: I’m not learning anything. I don’t understand. Admittedly, stumbling one’s way into a new land of skill sets feels far less exclusionary when there is no one else around to make you feel shut out. Still, it has been a lip-biting,  dejecting period, one that has opened up new vistas into the perverse and seemingly boundless perdition that is taking up a new instrument. You sign on to an eternal contract of self-doubt and intermittent agony, egged on by the uncertain promise that paradise awaits those who sacrifice and toe the line.

Believers, the Sabbath-and-Sunday kind, would say, well, hel-LO, Mister, that’s how the system works. For myself, a third-generation Russian-Polish-Latvian-American with a grim, pre-glasnost sense of punishment and reward,  learning a new instrument has seemed more like a Faustian pact turned on its head. Hell now, cash in later. But only maybe. The Devil has been known to change her mind at the eleventh hour.

The nemesis of the moment is a deceptively benign little hymn called “O Come Little Children,” which has proven unconquerable for the better part of three weeks.  Each new Suzuki assignment is calculated to throw a new wrench into the works, to open up new issues. In the case of “O Come Little Children,” one must come to grips with the rudiments of down bowing and up bowing (misnomers both,  since the terms don’t necessarily indicate which direction the bow is pointing}. In my typical eagerness to move things along,  I jumped the gun on the song prior to getting the green light from Tim, pre-rehearsing it with no knowledge of, or regard for, bowing marks. You could cut the hubris with a cake spatula; when Tim attempted to set me straight in the lesson hour, the song broke into crumbs. As I worked on the piece, ad nauseum, over the following weeks, sorting out the down bows from the ups proved to be the least of my problems. My bete noir, rather, was a high B that happens along at the critical apex of a crescendo. That wretched high B has eluded me at every go, as if the anonymous composer had pre-treated the composition with a B-resistant spray.

Hitting a note off-pitch has a domino effect: everything else falls with it. Squeaks tumble in. Fetid tone fills the air like flatulence in an elevator. The tip of the bow spears my bad left knee on a down bow. (Or is it an up bow? I can’t remember). Repetition proved futile: The harder I worked to hit the note, the greater the lapses. My left hand, groping in vain for the correct position, didn’t have a clue.

When I returned to lesson, Tim insisted that the problem was not, in point of fact, the left hand, but rather the right arm. He asked me to play the song again, ignoring the actual notes, transposing them instead entirely into open notes on the A and D strings. In taking the emphasis off moving the left hand about the neck to find the right notes, one should then become more aware of the axis of the right elbow as it adjusts to the down  and up bowing. The inspiration for this oddball exercise was a UConn professor named Mary Lou Rylands, and it was intended to engender what she called “right arm dominance.” In other words, let your right arm do the leading, and the correct notes will follow.

Well, in theory. Initially, the exercise felt clumsily self-defeating: I fell into confusion trying to figure out which notes should be played as an open A and which as an open D. As I fumfered about, Tm appeared flustered at my failure to validate Professor Rylands’ technique. Or perhaps he wasn’t, who knows? When you’ve raised a bull terrier who registered only two facial expressions for 15 1/2 years, you do a lot of projecting.

At the summit of my discontent, a deus ex machina arrived in the form of my friend Fabio, an accomplished pianist and veteran music teacher who has weathered volatile classroom battlefields not dissimilar to the one depicted in the Cantet film. Fabio met me for a coffee in Chelsea during my recent New York sojourn. I picked his brain while trying to excavate a modest wedge of strawberry-rhubarb crumble from a tower of whipped cream. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I was starving for tips on the art of practicing.

Fabio was voluble on the subject, and I distilled his advice to the following:

(1)  Establish the habit of practicing every day. Even if you are too tired or too busy and can only devote 15 minutes instead of an hour. Don’t go for three days without practicing and try to make up for time lost with five hours on the fourth.

(2)  Take breaks. Don’t hammer away at mistakes by repeating the problem area over and again. If you do, you will only keep making the same error and engender bad habits. Get up, move about, have a sip of something, think about what you are doing wrong and why.

(3)  Don’t obsess over your errors. The adult students who throw in the towel are generally those who make an obsession out of their weaknesses.

At my behest, Fabio talked a bit about the differences between child students and adult students (children have better muscle memory: adults, with more experience of music, pick up the notes more proficiently). When we were finished, we swung around his studio and he foraged through his closet for a copy of Russell Sherman’s “Piano Pieces,” a potpourri of meditations on mastering a musical instrument.

The exchange with Fabio had a cleansing effect. It scoured away some of the surface crust of my hyphenated-American fatalism. I got back in touch with the joy of practice, the blisss of ignorance. Everything seemed possible again. Well, if not everything, at very least “O Come Little Children.”

The half-haze one inhabits in the initial couple of hours following an evening’s sleep is very conducive to creativity and breakthrough. It’s a choice time for practice or psychotherapy. One gauzy morning, after weeks of cursing the anonymous composer of “O Come Little Children,” I opened the Suzuki book to the tune and made a renewed stab at right arm dominance. Eureka moment. Prof. Ryland’s open-note exercise suddenly began to gel. My right elbow responded with a new elasticity. I returned to the beginning of the song and played the melody as notated. I shifted between down and up bows with a fluid long bow. That elusive high B, once an adversary, began to make friends. The song began to sound more like a hymn and less like a cry for help.

One by one, the dominoes righted themselves. The tone burnished and became, dare I say, almost seductive. The song flowed plangently from my cello, practically without a hitch.

Before Tim returns from vacation, I intend to lose the almost and the practically.

This week, I bought a metronome. A Wittner, Malzel-system. It was the floor model, so the clerk knocked off 25%. This made my day. With tax, it came to a little over $90.

The following day, I saw the same one at a flea market for $20. Such is life.

For a neophyte musician such as myself, a metronome falls into that  category of life-changing, how-did-I-ever-get-by-without-it material possessions previously reserved for automatic dishwashers and those little egg slicers with the guillotine blades.

My Wittner is a solid German machine fashioned from sleek dark wood and shaped like an ancient Egyptian obelisk. It is deceptively petite, establishing rhythm as it does with a bullying tick and tock that instantly lets you know who’s in charge. For all its imperious clatter, however, the metronome is ultimately a slave to my beneficence: If I don’t turn the little key on the side, it slows to a halt. And each time it runs down, it sounds like a little death.

Once I bring it back to life, it must compete with two other percussive noisemakers in the vicinity: a 19th century pendulum clock that ticks away on the living room shelf, and a demented woodpecker who bangs away at the tin roof of the old stable behind the house. He begins before 6:00 in the morning, blasting me and Matthias out of our sleep like a jackhammer. We are told by those in the know that he has not in fact gone crackers but is merely trying to find a mate. I wish him well. For an unnattached woodpecker in mid-May, it must feel like closing time at the bar.

When the woodpecker, the clock and the metronome are all going at it, I am reminded of a gift shop that was run by a cousin of my mother’s in a small Adirondack village. The shop smelled of balsam needles and was chockablock with varnished wood boxes etched with the words “Souvenir of Tupper Lake, N.Y.” Scattered about the walls were two dozen or so cuckoo clocks whose residents would pop out to announce the arrival of each hour with an ear-splitting disregard for synchronicity. At high noon, that place was truly a bad dream come true.

On the face of my metronome, there is an adjustible tab set along a vertical slide, with little numbers that indicate where to set it to the desired tempo. This system was devised by and named for Johann Malzel, an early innovator of the metrononome. (An early rip-off artist, some might argue). Most of my early practice songs are marked Moderato, which Herr Malzel had determined to be between 108 and 120. This tempo, as it turns out, is fast. Sadistically fast.

Has Tim, my blithe teacher, been coddling me? I pick up my cello and attempt to apply the official Malzel moderato to  a foursquare folk song from the Suzuki book. By the time I reach the final bar of “Song of the Wind,” it feels as though I have been picked up by a mistral-force gust and dumped in the next county.

Eyeing the metronome suspiciously, I wonder if it isn’t broken. Ninety bucks for a lemon. I throw the Suzuki study-guide CD in my Apple hard drive and put on my headphones to check the official rendition of “Song of the Wind.” Sure enough, the studio musician is cooking. My metronome knows what it is doing.

Practicing at this new, neurotic moderato is exhilarating. I miss every fourth note, but my elbows and forearms are flying like mad all over the place. I feel a giddy sense of release, like a recalcitrant schoolboy who has been sprung for recess after being forced to spend the entire morning with his head on his desk. Later on, Matthias confides that this was why he loved  doing Suzuki on the violin as a child: Kids are simply tickled to be making string noises and don’t really care if they are hitting the note or not.

When I tell Tim of my experience at the next lesson, he listens with a patient smile that seems to say, That’s fine, Junior, now go to your seat and put your head back on the desk. He explains that tempo markings have evolved since Beethoven first scribbled them into his compositions, and that metronomes lean toward the accelerated end of the acceptable. By way of example, he pulls out a few books of Beethoven piano concertos and puts on a recording of a cello sonata. I nod in recognition at the sonata, without quite understanding what exactly is being illustrated by it.

As I try and match the moderato of my new mentronome, it can be frustrating accomodating the largo pacing of Tim’s teaching strategy, which seems to be geared more to the learning curve of his smaller-fry students. I’m no adult prodigy, but at the one- Suzuki-folk-song-per-lesson rate that we’re going, I will be collecting Social Security before I will be assaying Bach. Tim senses my impatience.  At one lesson, he notices  a crib sheet from the internet that I have clipped to my lesson book, an F clef scale with each of notes lettered; it’s my little rebellion against Suzuki, who teaches you how to play the notes first by giving you fingering numbers rather than the letters.

“That’s a nice scale,” he remarks. “Where did you get it?”

The tone of congenial interest belies a hint of testiness I have not heard from him before. When I explain that I want to be able to identify the notes so that I can better discuss problem areas in my practice, Tim says, “Well, yes, but it’s better to learn how to play the notes correctly before you learn what they are.”

The exchange marks a rare, barely perceptible note of tension in an increasingly relaxed teacher-pupil dynamic between Tim and me. If anything, lessons have become laid back to a fault. The first twenty minutes are chatty and aggressively informal, as if we are both gathering steam for the dreary, inevitable recital of the week’s Suzuki assignment. At the outset of one lesson, I inform Tim that Pieter Wispelway is scheduled to play the Bach Cello Suites in their entirety at Tanglewood. Excited at the news, he fires up his I-Tunes and pulls up several tracks of Wispelway’s Cello Suite recordings. We listen in worshipful silence, sharing the rapture. By the fourth track, however, I begin to experience that mild sense of entrapment I felt as a kid when my older brother Dennis, the family’s vinyl freak, would hold me hostage to the latest Led Zeppelin or Seals and Crofts. As Wispelway reaches for the heavens, my shoulders droop at the prospect of having to follow this virtuosic detour by scraping through “Song of the Wind,” moderato. Not even moderato. Sub-moderato. Largo.

The pain, the indignity, this business of having fingers that can’t keep pace with one’s aspirations.

Whoever originated the aphorism “Practice makes perfect” was a little, to be kind, out to lunch.

In the interest of accuracy and compassion, the speaker might have added a cautionary clause or parenthetical explaining the point of diminishing returns, that grim threshold one inevitably crosses wherein repetition ceases to foster improvement. When one oversteps that portal, one encounters a shadowy landscape of galumphing errors, bad habits and battered ego.

The trick, it would seem, is to cultivate a radar that senses this incipient danger zone in advance and enables one to stop, get up from one’s chair, let go with a primal scream and then sip a restorative glass of Brita-filtered water. Any damage to the larynx would be far less injurious than bouncing off the walls after the 27^th go-‘round of “Lightly Row” or beating up on oneself for once again falling short of that elusive state of perfection. As my redoubtable teacher Tim says, there is no perfection. There will always be a note that needs tweaking, a tone that wants refining, a pizzacato that begs for polishing.

For two months now, my cello and I have danced a Sisyphean fox trot of three-steps-forward-two-steps-back-four-steps-forward-three-steps-back. I don’t expect to master new steps anytime soon. There will always be a good day, followed by a bad day, followed (with any luck) by a good day. My tone will ring open and proud as a churchbell on the A, then whine like a hurdy-gurdy on the G. My right elbow will crane merrily northeast to facilitate a down bow, while my left elbow flakes out and droops southwest. Just when I think I’ve reached the final staff of an etude home free, my bow fingers will tumble with fatigue in the last two bars or the bow will drift absent-mindedly toward the bridge.

On those good days when it all seems to come together, I wish I had a surveillance camera running to record the event so that when lesson day rolls around and I fuck it all up playing for Tim, I can show him evidence that, at some point during the week, I knew what I was doing.

I am an itinerant practicer. I try not to idle in one room for more than a few consecutive days for the same reason that I tried to avoid taking the same seat twice in college classes: I don’t want to get too comfortable. I don’t want to ace an exercise in the bedroom, only to stumble through it in the living room or Tim’s lesson room because the feng shui is not as congenial.

When Matthias is in the city, I take over his second floor painting studio in the barn, a funky and majestic house of cards that was erected during the Civil War. Since that time, the three-story building has variously served as a workshop for a blacksmith, a woodworker who  banged out dubious pieces of furniture from laminated treetrunks and a hippie sports-car afficianado who never encountered an infrastructure deficiency that couldn’t be remedied with a bit of fishing-rod string and a gob of Elmer’s.

In the warmer months, the studio doubles as a second home for Matthias’ parrot, Cannobio, a 22-year-old African Gray who makes up in spirit what she lacks in loquacity. When Cannobio is crossed or feels as if she is being neglected, she has no compunctions about overturning her bowl of pistachios, even if it means going without dinner. When she is not shooting herself in the claw, Cannobio marches about an Escher-like jungle gym of tree branches that Matthias has extended from the studio’s front room and on into a back room.

While parrots are not reknowned for their facial expressiveness, I have been around Cannobio long enough to be able to get a fairly accurate reading on her moods. In the two months since she had her first close encounter with the cello, she has transitioned incrementally from terror to skepticism. At times, she regresses: when the cello comes out of its case in the front room, she skitters anxiously up a branch in the direction of the back room. At some point during the first half hour, however, she sidles quietly toward the front and stops at a vantage point just over my left shoulder. She remains there for the duration of the practice sesssion, observing every move with taciturn and curious eyes.

Having Cannobio as a critical audience often makes me ponder, with welling sadness, the absence of a magical bull terrier who left this world in December. Pearl was the house’s resident life force. Classical music invariably put her into a dreamy torpor; she would have reveled in my little daily bouts with my Apollonian self, resting upon her blue pillow with a Sphinx-like watchfulness. Well-meaning people persist in asking if we are going to get another dog, and I blink at them in stunned bemusement, as if they had asked me if I was going to go out and find a replacement mother. That said, I don’t doubt that the enormity of Pearl’s death had much to do with my taking up the cello. Could there be a more apt catharsis for the lost routine one shared with a companion of 15 years—in all its mundaneness and intimacy–then the quotidian tedium and immersion of practicing an instrument? And what instrument could better serve as a vessel for mourning, n’est-ce pas? Even the most buoyant music, filtered through the strings of a cello, carries an elegiac undertow.

So I am compelled to soldier on with this maddening business of practice. Not to “make perfect.” To master a proper elegy for Pearl.

And now, the pain.

It begins in the knuckle of the right thumb and traces an S curve down to the wrist, fanning back up into the index finger. How to describe? Numbness, stiffness, heat.

The pain set in the day following my last lesson, when I crossed my Rubicon. The period of novelty, the initial rush of oo-wow that comes from  humbling oneself before this majestic object and scraping out the first, primitive suggestions of a melody, had effectively ended. The period of agony, otherwise known as Getting it Right, had commenced.

I knew something had to give two weeks ago, when I attended a faculty concert at the University of Massachusetts to hear their sublime cellist-in-residence Astrid Scwheen in recital with pianist Estela Olevsky.  The program: Schumann’s Fantasie stucke, Op. 73 and Chopin’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 65 bookending a Spiritual Fantasy by Frederick Tillis (who was present) and a pleasingly psychedelic reverie for electronic cello composed by Gordon Green (aka Mr. Astrid Schween).

I plopped down in the third row, right of center, at a 45 degree angle from the cellist’s chair that would enable me to pay clinical attention to every last one of her gestures. Schween is a strikingly handsome woman in her 40s, I would say: warm eyes, light brown skin and a splendidly expressive mouth that morphs into odd smirks and grimaces when she slips into the trance of performance. Most of the time, however, I was watching her bowing wrist, which ducked and swayed with an uncanny elasticity that brought to mind a Marvel Comics character with superhuman gifts.

Once I sat across the aisle from Tommy Tune at a Pina Bausch performance. He was gesticulating with his arms and legs, trying to register and understand the dancers’ movements, record them for later reference. I thought of that as I eyed Schween’s reptilian wrist and attempted to mimic her gestures. The spirit was willing, but my wrist, a fly trapped in cement, was trapped and impotent.

Tim talks with a certain regularity about body mapping, a notion propagated by cellist William Conable that has to do with the relationship between one’s self-representation of one’s body and the quality of performance. If one has an accurate sense of how one’s body parts operate, one will play with efficiency and effectiveness. If one imprints one’s body innacurately, one will mess up and risk injury.

I don’t know how to begin to get a reading of my anatomy. I’ve owned my body for 56 years, but it is effectively a stranger. I have never attempted yoga. I shudder to recall my bumbling efforts to field a baseball or bounce a basketball without it skittering off.  In the pleistocene era of typerwriters, my wrists were compelled to be agile and versatile. In the years since, they have atrophied, gone to seed. I plop my wrists at the base of my MacBook while ten tentacles perform a strange and utterly unconscious lindy-hop around the keyboard. The rest of my body could be submerged in a mound of sand, for all it mattered, like Beckett’s Winnie.

Body mapping?  Can we talk? I’m getting back in touch with my right wrist,  and as I do, it feels as if I am exploring a region that is entirely off the map. Unchartered territory. The New World.

The key to correcting incorrect movement, according to Tim and the honorable Mr. Conable, is through “kinesthetic experience”: looking at pictures, models, watching oneself in the mirror, assimilating the moves of one’s teacher, shadowing Astrid Schween’s right arm in mid-flight. And, but not least, practice.

Time out for a sigh. A long, winding fugue of a sigh. Andante, if you please.

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” I am happy to report, is history. Tim, who now sports a week-old goatee (“my wife hates it”), asks me to run through the “French Folk Tune,” a simple up-and-down staircase of a melody. I get most of the notes, albeit with a surfeit of telltale squeaks and screeches that indicate a left finger has not hit its mark. I can feel Tim’s gaze as he watches my gestures intently. We work on keeping my left elbow up  and engaging my right elbow more proactively to lift and lower the bow. He shows me how to straighten my right wrist, which tends to droop as the song progresses. An exercise: “Think of revving up a motorcycle,” he says, as he pivots his hand up and down from the wrist. I have never revved a motorcycle, but I’ve seen “The Wild One” and “Easy Rider” enough times so that it is not a pants-splitting leap of the imagination to carry out. But I find it impossible to keep my wrist straight and keep it loose and limber at the same time. I play “French Folk Tune” again, and my wrist sinks, a slave to gravity; as it does, my fingers make a show of unity and slide off the bow.

My homework: Tim assigns “French Folk Tune” and “Lightly Row” for the coming week. He tells me to break the songs down into cadences; at the end of each cadence, stop, check out where my wrists and elbows are, correct them if necessary, continue. When I half-facetiously protest my slow crawl through the Suzuki book, he says, “It’s better to test drive new techniques on songs that you know rather than on something you don’t know. Does that make sense?” That makes total sense. Think in vehicles, Jan. I am learning to drive a stick. I am getting my trucker’s license. I am going to ride a motorbike.

I arrived tired: I leave wired, engine revved up. Tim tells me it’s been a good lesson, and I feel the elation that comes with validation. Halfway home, the high is overcome by a vague sense of despair, if not terror, at what is before me. With one lesson, the bar has been raised, oh, maybe a mile or two. I can’t just saw my way through a song without regard to my limbs and joints. I have to turn my right wrist into a Slinky toy, a wrist worthy of a Marvel superhero.

Having launched into each practice session with gusto for six weeks, I suddenly find myself dreading them.

My apprehension bears wormy fruit. It’s a miserable, bloody, frustrating week of practice. I go at “French Folk Tune” robotically, my upper body a taut frigate rope of knots and tension. The first cadence. Stop. Watch the left elbow, it’s slipping. Second cadence. Stop. Lift the right elbow. A little more. A little more. Third cadence. Stop. The wrist is drooping. Straighten the wrist. Loosen it up. How to do that, how to do that? Pain shoots through my right hand. Stop. Shake out the hand. I’ve lost my place in the music. Where am I? Where am I? Start at the beginning of the fourth cadence. Put  fingers back in place. Fourth cadence. Stop. Wrong notes, third finger needs to be raised a notch. Yeah, better. The left elbow, don’t forget the left elbow. The right wrist is drooping. Straighten it. The pain. Fuck. The fingers on the bow, slipping. Going. Going. Gone.

This repeats itself for the rest of the hour. By the end of the next day’s practice, I want to weep. By the end of the day following, my hand is throbbing with pain. By the fourth day, I’m starting to get a glimmer of my body map. It’s starting to materialize, like the details of a photograph surfacing in a dark room. I am not liking what I see.

This is what I see. My right wrist tells my fingers, okay guys, I’m going to try and loosen up here. You’re going to have to work with me. Pinky, third finger, look alive. Keep that bow up. But then as I relax my wrist and try to trod lightly through a cadence, my fingers want to relax as well. My pinky, third finger and second finger shout to the thumb to pick up the slack as they begin a slow, inevitable downward slide. By the third cadence, the bow begins to drop, putting the weight entirely on my thumb, which sends out alarm signals of pain.  I have to stop, shake the pain out my hand and shake life back into it. I fumble through the final cadence, my hand in flames.

By the fifth day, I am worried that I am doing irrevocable injury. I panic for a moment, imagining useless months of physical therapy ahead. I consider halting practice for a couple of days, but the thought seems anathema to me. I scan articles on the web on Body Mapping. I choose the answer that suits me. Barbara Conable’s article on how to resolve dystonia advises to “Keep making music every day.” Even if it means simply singing or shifting focus to the other hand.

The pain ebbs and flows over the weekend, but I push on, perhaps recklessly.

The seventh day of the week’s practice, I feel something beginning to stir. For the first time all week, however, my body is showing some semblance of synchronicity. The left elbow remembers to stay at attention, the right elbow lifts and pivots more organically with the shifting notes, the bow fingers drop less. Most thrillingly, the wrist displays glimmers of independence.

It’s not quite the eureka moment I’ve been praying for.  But, I figure , I’m still in the game.

Last night I watched that ’50s fluffball “Love in the Afternoon,” a poorly aging exemplar of May-September rom-com sophistication, Billy Wilder-style. Audrey Hepburn plays a Parisian cellist with an unfortunate haircut and a thing for graying American playboy Gary Cooper, despite his being a serial homewrecker and old enough to be an ancestor.  Audrey spends a good part of the movie traipsing around with a cello case clutched under one arm like a hatbox too large and strange to fit into a shopping bag. Every so often the cello is let out of its case on good behavior, and Audrey sits behind the instrument looking all moony-eyed (l’amour! l’amour!) while she loops over the same four notes. We presume they are intended to fit into the larger scheme of  Haydn’s Symphony #88, which she announces she is rehearsing with “the conservatory,” but the notes are so leaden and nondescript we can’t tell if they are Haydn #88, Mozart #9 or Lassie #2. (Instead of Haydn, Wilder throws in a gypsy band that bangs out more rounds of “Fascination” than have ever been endured by all the pigeons and tourists in Venice’s Piazza san Marco). The repetition becomes so grating that even Audrey’s detective father, an easygoing harbinger of Inspector Clouseau played by Maurice Chevalier, is compelled to comment, “Your Mr. Haydn seems to have run out of ideas when he got to his Symphony #88.”

I have never been a fan of Maurice Chevalier, but in this instance he has my sympathy. Repetition (which would also be M. Chevalier’s indigenous word for rehearsal) has become my raison d’etre, at least for the daily hour or two that I devote to Suzuki’s bloody French folk song. It’s actually a sweet melody—I love the little descending glide in the final clinch—but after sixty or seventy go-overs it begins to lose much of its down-on-the-farm je ne sais quoi.

This week, Tim adds harmonics into the mix, demonstrating the open string-third finger-open string-fourth finger combination that creates, voila, an arpeggio. It seems easy enough at first when I attempt my repetitions at home, but actually placing my fingers in the precise position to hit the proper notes is a whole other ballgame. Four notes, four invitations to go flat or sharp.

Tim also shows me how to tune the strings so they will be in tune with one another (even if otherwise out of tune). It involves an awkward splaying of fingrs that, while not terribly complicated, is just an inch over the border of  information that I can absorb in one sitting. When I try to do it at home, I draw a blank. Mental note: go to music store, splurge on a tuner.

As Tim and I continue the pleasant-weird process of getting to know one another, we trade music stories. Tim discusses, with subtle but palpable disdain, a John Cage piece which involves the conductor holding his baton in the air for four minutes and thirty-odd seconds of silence, then putting it down. The coughing, murmurs and nervous laughter from the audience, the cellphone rings and tap-tap-tapping of texting addicts, become the music.

In return, I tell Tim about a misbegotten performance of a Ligeti piece that Matthias and me attended at Amherst College, in which 100 metronomes are set off together on stage like racetrack greyhounds that have been doped to slow down rather than speed up. The metronomes are busy doing their thing as the audience enters, and we spend the better part of the first 15 minutes chatting away before realizing that this is it, this is the piece we came to hear. So the chattter begins to recede as we indulge the hypnotic and silly spectacle of 100 metronomes incrementally pooping out, and eventually, one by one, coming to a halt. For the 20-odd minutes in which this is all supposed to play out, our ears and eyes keep readjusting, zooming in and out on different aspects of the event: the way that the chorus of clicking morphs and diminishes as each metronome slows down and bows out; the various trajectories of each metronome needle, each one swaying with an almost proud display of independence. The problem that the producers of the Amherst event had not anticipated, however, was that they had assembled 100 state-of-the-art metronomes which were far more durable in wind-down length than the ones available at the time Ligeti created the piece. After a half hour, over half of the metronomes were still clacking away; after 35 minutes, it seemed that no end was in sight. The audience, a typical Amherst assemblage of white, taciturn music geeks, began to get rowdy, yelling epithets at the metronomes and launching into a hostile, unison hand-clapping that drowned out the defiant little instruments on stage. After 45 minutes, a young man with a look of terror in his eyes came out and stopped the ten or eleven hold-out metronomes by hand, to the obvious relief of everyone in the theater. He was followed sheepishly by the program’s artistic director, who explained to us that we had just witnessed a “bad performance” of the Ligeti piece.

This was all news to Tim, who had not heard of the piece and cocked his head in amusement.

How odd, this business of being taught a new skill by someone half your age. Everything that I must learn about playing the cello will come from this 27-year-old guy who exudes the buoyant, boyish manner of an Eagle Scout with a hundred music merit badges socked away in a drawer. That said, I am able to give back, whenever it is relevant and organic to the lesson at hand, a few nuggets of knowledge and school-of-life experience.

I’d like to say “I’m cool with that,” but the knowledge concerns me, if only just a little. I can already see the potential: to patronize, to overstep boundaries, to push in and try to co-opt, however briefly and unconsciously, the role of teacher. Funnily, I feel reassured and comforted in hindsight by  “Love in the Afternoon,”  which, for all its silliness, subverts expectations of who is the neophyte and and who is veteran. While the dynamic between Tim and me is absent of romance, it is heartening to bear in mind that Audrey Hepburn grabs and maintains the upper hand with Gary Cooper.