Death By Violin

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published Dec. 14, 2016] ©2016

 

Friendships can be tested in many ways but nothing really compares to a five-year-old with a violin.

 

A close friend’s three boys were good friends with my two, our families dining together frequently. My friend had always wanted a daughter, and in what I am speculating was the aftermath of an adult-beverage-infused evening (she all but said so), she and her husband decided to go for it. To their delight, nine months later came Minnie.

 

Let me just say that Minnie is now an adult and a lovely young woman. But five was not her best year. Recollecting back on a vacation we took with her family around that time, Olof’s and my common memory was wanting to leave Minnie by the side of the road.

 

It’s not at all surprising that a first-ever daughter showing up seven years after three boys would be cherished. But from her older brothers’ perspective, the moment Minnie was born, they became chopped liver.

 

If the boys behaved badly, they were sent to their rooms. If Minnie melted down, she had “low glycogen stores.” The boys complained that they should be able to have low glycogen stores too.

 

It was clear to everyone who knew our friends that the sun rose and set on Minnie’s little tushie. When dinner guests came, the boys were relegated to the kitchen but Minnie reigned at the dinner table basking in compulsory adoration.

 

In actuality, it was probably for Minnie’s safety that she wasn’t deposited in the kitchen with her brothers who in that era lost no opportunity to engage in revenge torment of her out of sight of her parents.

 

We really liked these long-time friends and we knew that Minnie would get eventually older, assuming her brothers didn’t kill her first. So we’d just have to wait it out.

 

That was until the violin.

 

Now, one of Minnie’s older sibs was a talented violinist. When Minnie was five, her parents determined on no rational basis whatsoever that that she was the next Jascha Heifetz. Her future at Carnegie Hall was a given.  Minnie herself seemed to have no interest in the violin but knew that producing it would be a phaser lock of attention on her for as long as she held this instrument in her little fingers, sawing back and forth as her Mom beamed adoringly.

 

Mom’s rationale for subjecting guests at every opportunity to Minnie and the violin was that it was important for Minnie to learn to perform in front of others. Efforts by all who knew her to explain that one might wait until a child could perform a single line of identifiable music fell on deaf ears.

 

That Christmas, we were invited to Christmas dinner along with our friends’ extended family whom we knew well. These friends were fabulous cooks so dining with them was always a gastronomic treat.  We had all barely retired, happily sated, to the open-concept family room after dinner, the folks doing dishes nearby, when Minnie appeared with the violin for a “Christmas concert.” The looks of collective horror went unnoticed.

 

And so Minnie sawed and screeched away. At the end of each alleged piece, we all clapped politely then looked at her parents beseechingly to parole us. But they were awash in Terminal Delusional Besottment. Never one to lose a captive audience, Minnie simpered, “Mommy, can I play one more?” (Sounded like the same cat-being-cruelly-decapitated-with-rusty-cheese-knife  tune to us each time.) And Mom would smile indulgently, “Well, just one more.”

 

A half hour later, the audience was starting to get desperate. One by one, they began getting up and wandering back into the dining room on the pretense of going to the rest room. Except, of course, they didn’t come back. Finally it was down to Olof and me. We were trading frantic non-verbal communications. Fantasies of creating a garrote with the violin strings were hard to stifle. Finally, I nodded to Olof and he made his escape. When Minnie finished her next “piece” some 40 minutes into this torture, I jumped up and clapped, making a dash for the dining room. If she asked if she could play just one more, I’ll never know. I was already gone.

 

In the dining room, everyone had resumed their dinner places. “Is she done?” whispered Minnie’s grandfather hopefully. They were hoping if they whispered, no one would find them.

 

Fortunately, after a very long year of Minnie concerts, even the violin teacher implored Minnie’s mom to let her “mature” for a few more years. Seriously, it was one of the happiest days of my life.

 

Now that Minnie and her brothers are adults, the playing field has leveled and they are all close. As I said, I’m enormously fond of her. And fortunately for my friendship with her mother, Minnie never took up a musical instrument again.

 

 

When Your House Is As Old As You Are

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published December 7, 2016] ©2016

 

Olof and I and our home all came into existence in 1947.  As the three of us slowly deteriorate, we can only see this as a sign of inanimate solidarity on the part of the house.  

 

While the house still has the same footprint it did in 1947, the interior  has been substantially upgraded.  But there are still remnants of 1947 lurking within. 

 

When the previous owners’ wallpaper installations were removed, we couldn’t help but notice that all the interior walls were originally painted either Prison Green or Pepto Bismol Pink.  No, really. Apparently these were the hot colors of 1947 -  a bold new post-War escape from boring white? Or else that paint was army surplus, leftover from the conflict. Plenty of houses had it.

 

But the one remnant that still attracts the most attention, especially from people who grew up in San Diego, is the yellow tile in our hallway bathroom. A guest will walk in there and all of a sudden I see him stop dead and stare at it.  “We had that same tile in my house when I was growing up,” he’ll say. He gets a misty far-away look in his eyes and I realize that his mind has gone to The Land of Showers Past. There’s some serious local nostalgia going on with that yellow tile. (It apparently had an equally-popular turquoise cousin.)

 

The other original-to-1947 feature are the red oak floors. They were covered in green shag carpet when we bought the house in 1973 and only saw light again in 1999 when we remodeled, which included adding actual outlets to the bathrooms. In 1947 electrical outlets in bathrooms were against code but once there were enough appliances that required outlets, the powers-that-be decided that if people want to risk electrocuting themselves by dropping a hair dryer in the tub, then it was their constitutional right. Of course, the advent of ground fault detectors probably played a big part in this as well. 

 

I’ve written before about how I grew up with hard wood floors and always coveted wall to wall carpeting. Of course, the hard wood floors of my youth were a different breed: cold, ugly, and high maintenance.  So it was a hard sell when Olof wanted to replace the embarrassingly ratty carpeting with refinished floors once he discovered the oak was under there. (I tried to keep it a secret.)  

 

When the floor refinisher ripped up the carpeting in one of the bedrooms, he inquired (sincerely), “Did this place used to be a barn?”  Turns out there were a LOT of animal urine stains in there that couldn’t be sanded out. Since we never had any pets other than fish and birds, they obviously predated us. It was clear some previous owner had NOT been walking the dog (or maybe the cow.)  Much of that floor needed to be replaced.

 

As most home improvers know, these projects have a domino effect.  As soon as the carpet was gone and the floors refinished, the temperature in the house dropped 20 degrees. This was because we had also dispensed with the 1947 floor furnace – an inefficient fume-spewing device that was alleged to heat the whole house but in fact just made the place smell really bad while raising the temperature some two degrees. (We don’t even want to speculate about C02.) Plug-in floor heaters would blow our 50 amp circuit breaker box within 20 seconds. So we were used to just wearing sweaters a lot in the colder months not realizing just how much floor insulation we were getting from the ratty carpet. But without it, it was suddenly downright cold.  So we had to have central heat put in. (Best investment ever.)

 

I confess that Olof and I have been slow to upgrade.  Olof hates chaos, I hate change, and we both hate to shop. Other than that, we were ideal remodelers. But the first thing that happened when we married in 1995 and Olof moved in was that our 50 amp circuit breaker box had to be upgraded when the kids kept microwaving Pop Tarts and blowing Olof off his computer. This marriage could not have been saved.

 

Our last existing 1947 anachronism is double-hung windows with counterweights. Every year I promise myself that this will be the year we replace them with casement windows that don’t incite bad words when you try to open them. OK, I’ll admit that those counterweights weren’t meant to last 69 years. But then we think of the construction mess and annoyance (see “not ideal remodelers” above) and go for Plan B (die first). 

 

And frankly, what really needs to be done to this house is to be razed and rebuilt. It – and we – weren’t meant to last forever.  But it’s not going to be by us. Have at it kids.

This yellow tile was a classic feature of “mid-century” homes

(a.k.a 1950s tract houses) in our area