Play Time

 Well, it was a momentous day for Freestone, who had his Suzuki Book 2 graduation recital.  You could tell how vitally important it was to him by the comments he kept making:  "Why didn't you tell me this was today?"..."What is this?"..."Where are we going?"..."What recital?  What am I playing?"  Yep, he could hardly contain his enthusiasm.  Nonetheless, when it was time to go, he dutifully set down his book and his dog and pulled on a sweater and some penny loafers.  He even brought his fiddle.

 These Suzuki things are always a mixture of pride and humiliation.  It's cool to see your kid up there and know all the practicing is paying off.  But it's demoralizing when he's standing next to that inevitable three-year-old in the bowtie graduating from Book 5.  You SO can't compare yourself to other parents, or your kids to other kids.  So what if I have one of the tall kids and not the child prodigy with a binkie in her mouth, playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto.

Contrary to what Freestone would tell you, he HAS been working hard on the Boccherini, playing it all the way through with repeats, with me, 2 to 4 times a day.  It's been fun.  Well, fun...I don't know if I'll go that far.  Freestone likes to take his time practicing, and I like to zip through it.  So my choices are:  let him practice alone slowly, or be really, really patient and practice with him.  I want to practice with Freestone because I love it, but patience isn't a luxury I can afford when Tziporah sees my being occupied as an opportunity to empty out my wallet and throw all the contents in the sink.  Add to that the fact that, while I'm practicing with Freestone, I can also hear that Ari is playing flat on her cello in her room, and in the basement, Xanthe is playing her piece at the speed of light, and Ruby's students are ringing the doorbell because even though I tell them week after week to just walk in, they won't, and Golda is calling for a ride home from Dance Company and Don Carlos just might need to go out and Ptolemy wants me to turn on his computer game and I'm not entirely sure that I'm not supposed to be meeting someone at the violin shop at that very moment and something is boiling on the stove.  There is a level of tension with 7 kids that never really goes away.  It's like living under those massive power lines that buzz, and you just hope and pray that they're not giving you radiation poisoning.  Lucky for me, I like having a buzz.  Who knew my drug of choice would be raising a big family?

But with all that noise, nothing about our life is conducive to musical success, other than the fact that we're not quitting.  The quote I live by, from Shinichi Suzuki, is:  "It was a result of circumstance that he learned to play the violin.  Whether he liked it or disliked it is not the question."

In other words, in our family, you play an instrument.  You just do.  Quitting it isn't a thing.  I wish we all played better, I wish we all practiced longer and more effectively, but at least it's there.  This goes back to the lesson I learned at the Baptist church in Harlem.  At that church, music wasn't some laborious task the kids had to learn.  It was just part of the fabric of life.  Nobody held up posters with cues about the lyrics.  Everybody just sang because that's what you did.  There was really no notion of "not knowing the song" or "not being a good singer."  Dr. Suzuki would have fit right in at that church in Harlem with his mantra, "Every child can."  Of course they can.  Nobody told them otherwise.  It's about loving the music.

Even if I can't create the perfect hothouse in which to grow child prodigies, at least I can insist that every day, there is some sort of crazy cacophony, out of which may come, one fine Saturday, a concert where I sit on the front row and beam.  And cringe.  But mostly beam.  And it's enough.

And, icing on the cake, we got to visit Grandma after the recital, proving that Freestone looks miserable in pictures even when he's happy, and that Marlene looks beautiful even when she's recovering from surgery!