2:57pm:
Sometime before Christmas in 2005 my mother and I invested in a toy accordion.
It spoke to us in a moment of weakness during a nightmarish trip to Wal-Mart. Yes, we do shop at Wal-Mart. Or at least we did that one time, when we anted to get a DVD for my aunt’s Christmas present. As you all know, my aunt has Down’s syndrome and lives in supervised apartments in a small town in Iowa. Their only chain store is a Wal-Mart and we thought that we could shuffle the exchange-burden (were exchange necessary) on to the apartment managers rather than my grandmother.
Do you all ever go into Wal-Marts? The first thing I noticed was the parking lot. It was, it seemed, the first time since I had returned to the United States that I found myself among normal people. Although my mom lives in a mixed-income neighborhood and our local Smith’s Marketplace (which we still stubbornly call Fred Meyer’s) does have some clientele from the “Central City”, it is still mostly soccer parents in their SUVs (and now, increasingly, our Prii) and absurdly wealthy people—yuppies, people my age, college students. Where does all this money come from? Seriously, where?
At Wal-Mart, though, they have their share of SUVs but also old Chevy sedans and pick-ups and the like. Our old Subaru Legacy Outback, one of the more popular cars in our part of town (the trend started about the time my mother bought her first one and turned toward Prii about the time my mother got her Prius) was definitely out of place in the covered parking ramp at Wally World. Her Smith and Brown stickers, so helpful in distinguishing our car from the millions of look-a-likes in the Costco parking lot down the street, just seemed like pretentious advertisements for obscure institutions with Latin-inscribed seals. Which is what they were.
We were looking for The Sound of Music which was, of course, a nightmare. I do not advise spending any time in the CD and DVD section of Wal-Mart, especially not during Christmas season. Did I mention that this was the end of a Friday afternoon in which my mother left work at 2 to do all of her Christmas shopping in four hours? As we maneuvered through the jungle of Chinese-made ugliness, my mother promised herself that we would go to Sugarhouse last and buy a c.d. for Aunt Maxine and a cookbook for Vicky and Shelly at Salt City C.D.s or Barnes and Noble where she could have a relaxing latte and I would have a soy mocha at Starbucks because the weather was frankly too crappy to bear crossing the street in the cold dark December night. My mother loves to bribe me with the promise of soy mochas, mostly because she loves lattes that she does not make herself. She views as lesser people who spend three or four dollars on a cup of coffee, but she tells herself that it is for me or my sister and not a treat for herself.
As we finished our DVD quest we started to notice the cutest little Chicano boy wandering around with a toy accordion. He was maybe four or five and hit us at a weak moment. We began scouring the toy section for the accordions. There was no question in my mother’s mind. We would buy it for ourselves.
At the time we said that we would learn to play “Happy Birthday” in time for Aunt Maxine’s birthday in January but when we got home there were so many other things to do—wrap presents, get things in boxes to send, get myself ready to go to New York the next morning. I opened the box and looked at the instruction book but was frankly intimidated. What child could ever follow these instructions? It seemed insanely complicated just to come to “Hot Cross Buns” (everyone’s first recorder song) let alone “Happy Birthday”. I left for New York and we both went to Massachusetts while the accordion stayed home. Right before Aunt Maxine’s birthday, we got the accordion out and halfheartedly looked at the booklet again, but we clearly would not be playing in time for the birthday.
The accordion stayed on the buffet for a while and then my mother put it in one of her secret storage places. I went to Brazil. Nine months later, I came back from Brazil. On my first afternoon we went with Toni to Olivera Street in L.A. While we waited for to-go boxes, Toni went out shopping for gifts; as my mother and I searched for her a few minutes later, we admired the selection of toy accordions at the kitschy tourist stands. When we found Toni, she had bought two, one for each granddaughter. Her daughter would certainly hate her for this, everyone remarked.
When we got home, the accordion (along with a harmonica) was sitting on the piano bench. The aforementioned granddaughters love to play with the piano and the last time they were over, they apparently had the joy of a more complete compliment of noisemakers. One or two days later, I picked up the accordion. I started making noise. It moved into the family room. I picked it up several other times when I felt like making noise and being annoyingly infantile. All of us deserve a bit of being infantile in our final week before turning thirty.
Our accordion has three buttons on the left side. One is the air release (so you can pull the bellows out or compress them without making noise) and two others that cause the thing to make complex sounds that I can only describe as chords. On my third or fourth one-minute session with the accordion (I can be pretty ADHD, as you might know) I discovered that if you don’t push in any of those buttons, you get simple notes. Starting with the bellows out, in and out, in and out, in and out starts the scale. Then it reverses on the lower buttons: out and in, out and in. “Maybe we will know ‘Happy Birthday’” before Steve’s next birthday!” I proclaimed. My mother was actually impressed that I had gotten anywhere with the thing.
This morning I picked it up and started playing scales while my mother was having a bathroom break in the middle of making pecan waffles for breakfast. (Have I mentioned that I sometimes make unreasonable demands of my mother? Like, a triple chocolate cake and pecan waffles by 7:30 is something that you can demand at age ten but not at age thirty, even if she does save the frosting for later.)
So I went to my little accordion this morning and realized that even though I had just barely figured out the scales and only played them four or five times (or maybe not even that many—scales on the accordion are, at least at first, excruciating), of course I could play “Happy Birthday”. I started. Let’s try starting with this note, I thought. Immediately the song began to take shape. Soon I was playing it all the way through although I am still a bit shaky at the last bar or two. Accordions, you see, are not like guitars or mandolins or xylophones or pianos. A pushbutton accordion is played by feel (as is a guitar or mandolin, I guess, but it is somehow very different). You have to remember the outs and ins, which sounds are where (both the button and if that note is an out or in) and where the damn thing changes direction. It is like you know which note you want but you can’t find the damn thing half the time. Not only that, but you have to learn to pull the thing all the way out to start and do multiple notes on ins and outs—the worst thing when playing the accordion is to find that your instrument is all the way in when you need an in note in the middle of a bar. This is not the best time to use the air release, as you might guess. It leads to some nasty gaps. Not only that, children’s accordions are made for hands even smaller than mine (if you can believe it) so this one makes my thumb hurt after a very small amount of playing.
Meanwhile, my mother has already commented that I have more natural knack for accordion than for the mandolin (not that she really knows, of course). Which begs the question: will I be playing “Asa branca” in time for São João in late June? Because I have this “Happy Birthday” thing down. In our family, this is a good thing because my accordion can now cover up our terrible sense of pitch.
Current Music: gilberto gil-asa branca (total coincidence--seriously)
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