gpc

At the coffee shop where I read the paper, a young bespectacled bearded man points to my bandaged knee.

“What’s up with the leg, man?”

“Skateboarding accident,” I say.

He nods. “Right on, right on…”

I grew up as one of those dreaded kiddie concertmasters — but I swear I was not any kind of prodigy. Six years’ worth of all-county orchestras and four with the youth symphony taught me to accept my status as a mere third-string Asian violinist. But back then “third-string Asian” still meant you could tune up a high school orchestra.

I had trouble finding violin teachers who would stick by me. I was lazy, I hated to practice, and I had little respect for composers.

The last teacher I had was Mr. Silfer, who lived on the south side of the city. He gave violin lessons out of his basement; I think it was twenty dollars per half-hour lesson. He was in his seventies, and his memory would occasionally fail him. But he taught me how to take it beyond just the notes. If you didn’t feel anything, then you weren’t playing it right.

Of course, if you didn’t practice, you weren’t playing it right either.

I remember one week in high school when I hadn’t practiced at all, and I was panicking. Usually I could cram for a lesson by practicing the afternoon before. But this particular week I was coming straight from school. There was no time to cram.

As I drove toward the city, I rehearsed my apology. I’m sorry, Mr. Silfer, but I was busy with school and everything. I had to finish this English paper and I’ve only got a B minus so far in the class and if I don’t get an A it’s going to screw up my college applications…

I figured he would buy it as long as I sounded convincing.

But after I parked the car by the curb in front of his house, I decided to go with a much more sinister lie. I pulled out the sheet music from my backpack and turned to my homework — it was a section marked off in pencil: the date of last week’s lesson (“start here”) and two vertical lines (“stop here”). At the beginning of each lesson he would erase these marks, and a half hour later he would write new ones. They were to remind me, as well as himself.

I looked carefully at the page. I could still make out the marks he had erased the previous week. So I wrote over them with a pencil, but changed the date. And then I erased the newer marks. My homework vanished. 

And so I won: I avoided having to admit my laziness to one of the best teachers I ever had.

And so I lost: I tricked an honest man, and every now and then I remember exactly how it happened.