OLEAN -- I hear Christmas music again, everywhere. It seems like it's being played more often than last year. It seems ubiquitous. Malls, radio, TV advertisements, TV shows, street singers, campus buildings, storefronts, amplifiers blaring from municipal light poles. Maybe it's just me.
Whatever the case, it puts me in mind of my failed childhood career as an unpaid holiday entertainer -- unless you count chocolate-covered peanuts and raisins as remuneration.
My whole family was musical -- except for me, the youngest child. My mother played the piano beautifully. She was frequently asked to play at community events, or fill in for the elementary school music teacher. As she grew older, and afflicted with arthritis in both hands, she often turned down the offers. But she still played at home, almost every day, on the Betsy Ross Spinet my father surprised her with the Christmas I was 6.
My father had played the clarinet well enough to sit in a few times in community orchestras. My great uncle Frosty (DeForest was his real name) was a renowned cornet player whose talent got him into a parade band once conducted by the famed "March King" John Philip Sousa.
My next brother Jim played trombone well enough to make his college band, and my oldest brother, Bill -- perhaps with most natural talent in the lot -- played a beautiful trumpet in clubs and at dances all through high school and college (even square dances, if you can picture that), and won drum and bugle corps competitions. Jim and Bill used to take over my bedroom for jam sessions with their high school buddies. I was allowed to stay if I kept quiet.
And so it was that in about fourth grade I was encouraged (read: forced, made, ordered, etc.) to present myself to the elementary school bandmaster and let him nudge me in the right direction as to instrument of choice. He was an elderly Italian gentleman, Frank Marra, of some renown himself for his trumpet skills, and I expressed a fancy for the drums -- having nicked up much of my mother's good furniture by whacking out what I thought were rhythms with rulers, pencils, knives, candles or any other quasi-cylindrical household items I could get my hands on.
He sat me down at a fine set of skins in his office and auditioned me by playing an upbeat melody on the trumpet. It was the first time I'd had a real set of drumsticks in my hands. I was awful. After about eight bars, he held up his free hand and tried not to wince. He was gentle with me. He even made excuses for me. My hands were not big enough yet, he observed, for mastering drumbeats.
"Lemme holda you fingers," he demanded. I complied.
"Long and-a thin, like-a you father's," he observed. "These-a be perfect for this."
He handed me a clarinet. I thought my fingers were short and stubby. It turned out Mr. Marra had heard my father play the clarinet, and liked what he heard. I would follow my father, he said.
I stunk on that instrument, too. Oh, I played in a couple of grade school band concerts, and lasted maybe 18 months on the borrowed instrument. My finger work was nimble and fine, but I never could get the hang of that reed thing or how to control it. I tended to waterlog the damn thing with saliva and it tickled my tongue when it vibrated. Just when I thought I was mastering it, the squawks and ear-splitting squeaks would ensue -- always at the most embarrassing moments. I even played unintended notes when I incorrectly breathed in through my mouth.
My father learned my practice schedule and took to coming home late. My school grades were straight-A, except in music and band, where I fell to a D. Enough, said my mother. I would switch to piano.
At first, it was swell. I loved discovering the left hand did something different than the right, and that one could improvise and still make sounds that were pleasing. I practiced. I snuck into the parlor where the piano was at odd times and played new tunes without being directed to by my mother. I progressed.
My mother hired a local private teacher who came to the house, and by the time I was 11, the polite but stern lady had me ripping through Leila Fletcher's Book Four. Maybe I had some musical ability after all. I mastered the dumbed-down version of Chopin's "Valse Brilliante" and several other beginner's standards. Then, I learned that with some trial-and-error and a little practice, I could cobble together popular tunes I liked from listening to the radio.
My greatest success was replicating Reg Owen's souped-up version of the old church tune "Manhattan Spiritual" -- probably because it featured easy C major and G major chords that you could convert to F sharp without segue problems, and because playing it fortissimo drowned out most of the mistakes: DAHT-DAHT DAAAAAH, DA-DA-DA-DA DAAAAHHH ...
I also liked the Bill Justis version of "Raunchy," a jazzy hit arranged for saxophone, but which lent itself easily to piano. I played for my buddies, but their attention usually wandered after a couple of tunes, and we'd go do something else.
I was at the time an altar boy at Immaculate Conception, the only Roman Catholic Church in my little North Country town upstate, and regularly served the longtime pastor, Father James Jacobus McGowan -- a tough little Irishman who took no guff but always had a twinkle in his eye. I knew the lovely old church inside and out.
One snowy December night, urged on by my pal Lenny Tucker and two other bored friends, I somehow concluded it would be a good idea to sneak into the church and its choir loft so I could fire up the organ and play "Manhattan Spiritual" in the new up-tempo version I had concocted. I knew how to work the pedals from watching my mother and the church organist.
I figured the lawn between the church and the rectory was wide enough to diminish the sound (it looks tiny to me today), and besides, Father McGowan always told us he liked to go to bed early. It sounded magnificent, and loud.
I was slamming into the second verse when Father McGowan's footsteps came clunking up the side stairs into the loft. He was in robe, I think, and pajamas. I think he said some things in his native Gaelic tongue before demanding to know "what in blazes" was going on, but that may be my imagination. I did what young boys usually do.
I fibbed: We were, uh, practicing songs -- uh, religious songs at that -- because (never mind that only two of us were Catholics) we planned on joining the church choir.
Yes, that's the ticket, we really want to join the church choir. Father McGowan's left eyebrow shot up.
"Join the choir, is it?" he barked. "Play that lively one again." I broke into "Manhattan Spiritual."
The priest cut me off: "It's a fine piece, and I like it, but it's a bit too fast for the Mass or any other service." Then he sent us home. I thought we were off the hook. The next evening at supper, however, my devout mother -- who seemed to divine such things, and had a direct pipeline to the good Father McGowan through the Altar and Rosary Society in any case -- coyly asked if I'd ever thought of singing in the church choir.
Oh, Gawd, she knew! And that's how I ended up in the Immaculate Conception Church Choir for about three months, until I convinced my mother and choirmaster Myrna Garrity that my boyish soprano was changing to a frog-like tenor I couldn't control. I deliberately sang off-key for two Sundays before they let me quit. Mom wasn't through with me, though. She knew I'd been faking the interest in the choir. My burgeoning musical talents would still be on display, she assured me.
My mother dragooned me and my best friend and neighbor -- and choir loft participant -- Tom Stephens (the talented boy I described in a previous column as drowning about three years after this episode) into playing her freshly tuned Betsy Ross Spinet for her bridge parties.
And for her book club parties. And for her North Country Women's Collegiate Association parties. And for just about any other gathering she hosted -- especially around Christmas time. Friends, relatives, associates, fellow teachers, men, women, other snickering kids and classmates -- didn't matter. Tom and I had to wear dry-cleaned little maroon blazers, pressed slacks, white shirts and bow ties as we plinked our way through "Valse Brilliante" and other classics from Fletcher Books Three and Four. We didn't take requests.
That wasn't the half of it. After the polite applause and cooing kudos subsided (about two seconds), Tom and I had to distribute the party favors. Our backs erect, cut-glass dishes filled with bridge mix, raisins and specialty nuts, we made sure the party favors were always proffered with polite detachment. Then we would hasten back to the kitchen to gorge ourselves on the leftover goodies. Sometimes there were chocolate-covered cherries. Those, we gobbled first. Always, we left evidence on our blazer fronts.
This regimen was particularly bad news around Yuletide season.
Not only would such parties require our practicing Christmas songs and carols, but my beloved, rambunctious Labrador retriever Buck would be gussied up in a big red velvet bow around his neck and then pressed into a single isn't-he-cute appearance before barking himself hoarse in the woodshed to which he'd been subsequently relegated. Buck could get himself in enough trouble on the best of days, and putting him in the proximity of candy or any kind of food -- not to mention in front of strangers attired in Christmas finery -- was a decision I considered foolhardy. And I would get blamed for his lack of manners. More than once, a stranger's post-party dry-cleaning bill would come out of my allowance.
This short musical career only lasted about two more Christmas seasons. Tom and I were both getting good at baseball (he much better than I) and we turned into those kids in the Norman Rockwell painting who would leave their piano lessons by sneaking out the nearby window to go play ball. I dreamed not of concert stages and orchestra pits, but of Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. I couldn't seem to master Leila Fletcher Book Five. After a while, I couldn't even play Book Four.
My mother knew a lost cause when she saw one. I was perfectly content to let my repertoire consist of "Manhattan Spiritual" and about four other songs I'd memorized. She let me quit. I rejoiced at the lack of duties when the next Christmas rolled around. That was more than half a century ago.
Today, of course, I would give anything to hear my mother scolding me again for my slow left hand, to laugh at sly Tom as he "accidentally" spilled a cashew or two on some poor old lady's lap, to hurriedly drag a protesting Buck by his collar into the kitchen so he wouldn't wolf down a plate full of holiday cookies in front of the guests, to ignore my homework and blame it on my brothers as they played "Muskrat Ramble" in my room with their buddies, to see the frozen look on Lenny Tucker's face as Father McGowan charged up the choir loft stairs. Heck, I would give almost anything these days to be able to play the piano competently. (Maybe there's still time to take it up again. Naaaah, too busy ...)
I guess that's partly what Christmas time is for -- to remember the odd holiday moment or two, whether it be bittersweet or delicious. It must be the music that triggers that particular flood of thought, and makes such Yuletide nostalgia singularly keen.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 12 2006 |