A rental house around the corner burned down the other day. Two alarms, a big blaze at 12:30 in the morning, embers flying down the block. There but for the love of God and a candle on the wooden deck go I, you think.
One of the guys in the house was apparently a bit of a musician; as I was walking by on my way to the store yesterday night, I saw the back of what looked like a large guitar propped up against the stairs then, on the return trip I saw something I’d missed from the direction I was walking: one cello, heavily singed.
Back in grade school — in those long-ago days of music enrichment programs — I was assigned to play the viola. But my little birth defect made holding and fingering a viola exceedingly difficult, so they switched me to cello. All I can say is, seeing the burned cello made me sad, even though lugging a cello a mile and a half home after school was a lot more work than carring the viola.