For, Oh, 77! Mush!

In which our Hero twiddles his fingers on imaginary keys

[BonnieRose] suggested we make something of a garden/art project out of our OpenDiary by setting down regrets to be buried with the rest of the site. I’m intrigued by the idea. At the same time, some of those are great stones buried deep, and I don’t know that I want to disinter them. What if there’s unprocessed hurt there?

God help me, I regret putting down my accordion.

I will deny it in any public conversation, but I am beginning to recover the humour of the damned thing and age and research have lead me to the realization that it might not have the panty-peeling grandissimo of the rock guitar but it’s at the very least a remarkable machine. Honestly, I wish they’d taught me more about the physical device because I think I would have been much more interested if I’d known my tool better. It’s a wood-wind instrument technically, a bellows pumped concordance of clarinets.

It’s an undignified instrument. I grew up playing the thing in an age where Lawrence Welk reruns and Weird Al ensured the complete and utter impossibility of coolness. I changed school after school and yet it was this albatross around my neck (I don’t really think that’s a great metaphor) for about the whole decade I spent on it. And I was so glad to walk away from it.

I wish I’d stuck with it because I remember that I’d reached that point where it had started to become fun not just for reasons of technical mastery of skill but the music was leaving behind the polkas for something a little sexier. Like a waltz. Kidding. Less pieces of music that were about educational difficulty and more about pieces that were just skill testing and beautiful. And now it’s a lost skill. My father did his thing and threw out the worn and beaten up object cluttering our space, ignoring the fact that it was a professional instrument that at the least we could have sold for a grand or two of residual value. Or I could dabble with it again with a lot more satisfaction and a lot less finger pain than I get from Steve the neglected guitar.

And there’s just no way that I can see myself spending the money to buy a new accordion. The affordable ones are not as capable as my horrible beasty, and I’m not going to spend tonnes of money on something that I’m not going to use so much. Damn me for practical.

I’ve already put contact information into a more official farewell to this place. Everything since that entry is just doodling in the notebook because there are a few pages left. Just in case, though, good bye.