Random Childhood Memories 2

I was a klutz as a kid, always bumping into things, dropping things… I remember walking into one of my parents’ parked car’s side mirror once. It was right at head level and boy did that hurt. I’m sorry to say that one of my sons has inherited this klutziness. Given how much I enjoy playing sports and got pretty decent at some of them, I’m happy to report, however, that you can mostly grow out of klutziness.

I guess I already had strong musical opinions as a kid. There were some notes in some pieces that I just was certain were wrong. The composer (even Mozart, or Tchaikovsky) could not have intended such or such a note… So I changed them and played what I thought was right. My violin teacher let me do this here and there. Gotta pick your battles I guess.

My teacher excelled at getting me to play things the way she wanted, all the time with me thinking it was me in control. She wanted me to play scales, and I hated scales so I “lost” my Carl Flesch music (I stuffed it behind a bookshelf in my parents’ house, completely inaccessible without moving tons of things, and then pretended it was lost). Rather than push me to play scales, she would then just find scalar passages and other passage work in the pieces I was learning, and had me do all sorts of technical variations with those passages. Not exactly scales, but still learning all the rudiments, while I thought I was practicing “real music.” I mostly learned technique on Paganini Caprices and Bach instead of etudes. When I played for another teacher at some point in high school, he asked me to play a scale, and I didn’t even know the standard fingerings… he asked if I could play thirds, and I replied that I didn’t know what he meant, but Paganini’s ninth caprice has thirds, would he like me to play that? Or when he asked for arpeggios, I suggested the first caprice… He was a traditional teacher and while I worked with him, he insisted that I also learn proper scales. I now understand the reasons for this, but at the time, it was incredibly difficult for me to accept.

As a twelve-year-old picky eater on tour to Japan for 2 months, it was tough to find regular things I liked to eat. I wish I liked Japanese cuisine then as much as I do now. One time my mother and I went to an Italian restaurant, and specified “sauce on the side” for the very simple-looking spaghetti and meat sauce on the menu. There was a sea creature with its eyes still staring at me sitting on top of the meat sauce when it arrived… most recently when I was in Osaka, I went to hole-in-the-wall restaurants and spoke no Japanese, I just asked for good food and that’s what I ate, and it was delicious even if I don’t know what it was.

The return trip from Japan to Chicago in 1994 was in a 747 — sadly not many of these in service any longer. A large number of the cast and crew were all seated in the hump of the plane. There was a big space between two of the rows, I guess for exit accessibility. It is a long flight, and at some point, people just put down blankets in this large space and many of us lay on the floor taking naps. On the same flight, some attendants took us into the cockpit. During the flight. Seeing the world above the clouds from the front of an airplane is nothing like the little windows on the side. It seemed so expansive and simple and beautiful.

Travel pre-pervasive laptops and tablets: you could choose to watch the movie or not. The worst choice of movie I have ever seen projected while on an airplane – Apollo 13. What were they thinking? Besides, the audio was always terrible and the movies were hard to hear. On another flight they had a camera underneath the belly of the plane and projected the runway as we approached, people screamed with fear. I thought it was great.