A
mandola
is a less tightly strung, larger version of a mandolin. This one, someone told Jeremy, had been stepped on, which may have been true. Whatever the cause,
it had been cracked for as long as he’d owned it, and
certainly never played since his grandfather had gotten Parkinson’s and lost
the touch. Now it is repaired.
Jeremy took
it to the Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island and they were very apologetic
about having to put two posts under the bridge. But maybe it was good. Maybe
these posts worked like the sound post in a fiddle. They told him it was at
least eighty years old, a version made from a 1908 patent. It says “The Gibson” as if it was named. I asked if this was Gibson as in the guitars made today in Memphis. Jeremy said the
Mandolin Brothers had told him yes. It was a Gibson before Gibson got big.
Annie
pointed out that the label inside the instrument said, “Guaranteed” and she
suggested that Jeremy should have collected on the
guarantee instead of paying to repair it. The Gibson plant is rich with the perfume of glue, varnish, the dust and shavings from
clean, raw wood that comes from handwork, and I’m sure they would have been
charmed to see it. The Mandolin Brothers had stitched together a couple of cracks, adjusted
the neck. They had to hydrate the wood for months, it was so dry. They are
eccentric, old men who love these instruments.
Jeremy’s
grandfather had been a butcher, a boxer, a policeman.
Once, while on duty in San Francisco, someone hit him in the head with a liquor
bottle and he had to go with Jeremy’s grandmother and mother out to the
countryside to heal for a number of years. That’s what they did in those days,
go someplace quiet to heal.
The instrument seemed to want Jeremy in a yoga position. He played— filled
the instrument with all his own activity. Dark, he called the tone.
Then something happened, and Jeremy
disappeared. None of us were in his apartment anymore with its steel window
frames and view across the East River to the Manhattan skyline. We were somewhere
else inside the strange old resonance between that instrument and time.
Listen, the instrument was inside a forest of pine with the light streaming down, a quiet place where one goes to heal.
