My father was always immersed in classical music. When I was very small, there was some Brahms and Dvorak. Handel's Messiah was staple every Christmas and Easter season; Faure's Requiem was a favorite. At my first show of interest in Tschaikovsky (as a break from, say, the Beatles or Gordon Lightfoot), he was thrilled.

During that time I came to know just about every note in all three Tschaikovsky ballets. The Nutcracker Suite album got played into oblivion, and he bought a new album set (aha, but this one was The Complete Nutcracker.) Sleeping Beauty was on reel-to-reel tape. Not long after that, he came home with another album set-- this time, the full Swan Lake.

Who could ask for more?

Every afternoon after school was spent in the living room for months and months at a time, listening always and only to the three ballets. My narrow interest concerned my father, and he offered Mozart or Beethoven to no avail. It was during this time, immersed in Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, that I realised how sweet a violin could be. Unfortunately I had heard that it was terribly, terribly difficult to learn, and almost impossible to play well. ("No frets???") So although I loved the sound of the violin, I never tried it.

After college came Scottish dance and music, and-- fiddling. The instrument looked surprisingly like a violin (in fact, there is no difference). Boston had a Scottish fiddle club.

Club??

Normal mortals can learn to play-- in their Spare Time???

Determination germinated and grew, quietly at first. But how to get one? Rich I was not, yet this desire was from God, so that meant he would somehow provide one.

Pastor Dave had the same longing to play a violin, and he had bought himself a 3/4 practice violin, which he loaned me. It was basically a fingerboard with strings, and a pseudobody made of particle board, but it supported scales and some simple scottish airs.

Several months later, my Dad and I were scrounging around a permanent New England barn sale/ junk shop, after askingif there were any violins in the place I was led to an old wooden case with loose wood rattling around inside it. The glue was brittle and dead, and the front and back were flapping loose from the sides. The bow looked worse. And yet... somehow this was it. They wanted fifty. I offered twenty five. They took it.

How to put it together? Send it to an expert? With whose fortune?? No, I would-- somehow- have to do it, terrified, working up my courage to look at it from an engineer's point of view, trying to lay aside my musician's feelings for the time being.

A wiry and energetic folk fiddler, when he saw the violin pieces, was surprised and intrigued, and postulated that here were the parts to three different violins-- front, back, and sides/fingerboard. He was surprised that they had ever been put together in the first place.

Stunned, my heart and my stomach sank into my shoes. "Can I put it together again?" I asked, fearing that the answer would be no. His green eyes looked intently over his bushy brown moustache, and he said, "Music comes from tension. Putting the parts of three different violins together might make a tension that creates really beautiful music. Try it and see how it comes out. " Then he told me how to take it apart and where to delicately shave the wood so it would fit better.

Still stunned and now more afraid of failure than ever, I thought it over, and prayed and prayed that it would not be destroyed and that it would sound good. Many days later, after washing the old glue away a little each day with a syringe and water, it finally came completely apart (a terrifying moment lest the wood split and ruin everything). Many more days were nervously (and prayer-fully) spent delicately shaving to make it join more snugly. Making clamps out of spools and bolts and leather disks, and still praying, I very, very cautiously glued it back together with Hide glue. (The whole project took more patience than ever exercised before in my life. )

Finally completed, strung, and played: it did sing! It sounded good. No, more than that. God mercifully answered the desperate prayers, and it sounded wonderful. My relief that it came out well was passed only by my delight in the sound.

The other relief was, that for someone with some musical experience and a sense of how strings work, the violin (or the fiddle) is less difficult to learn. It takes a good ear, but a lot of fiddle players out there started out on the guitar first.

Time passed; I joined the fiddle club, and re-learned to read music, but this time, the result was different, and I grew almost comfortable reading. Two years after that, life grew busier and busier; I played it at church several times, but steadily, violin time dwindled down to nothing as the demand for other instruments resurfaced.

Now it waits in the case, on the floor beside the guitars and the harp. Someday I will take it up again, but the time is not now.

Still, it is a treasure, and a blessing from God; I hope I never forget the wonder of God's work through my hands, both to assemble it and to play it. Someday its music will flow again. "May that day be not too long delayed."

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