Dear Accordion,
The weather is getting so warm. I thought about you, the other day while basking in the sun. I thought of you spending your life cramped in a locker, deep in the subterranean bowels of the music building, where daylight never enters.
I show up to practice unpredictably heaving you out of the locker, complaining of your excessive heaviness. But when I sit down and set you on my knees, your weight is solid and comforting. I stretch open your bellows like a lawn, and then we play, and I love the feeling of your vibration.
I wonder about your life before I met you... what other laps have you sat in? Whose fingers have danced on your buttons? Your previous owners were better than I am, weren’t they? I bet they played runs all day long and could improvise any kind of style. You probably miss playing music with them.
These imaginary geniuses make me jealous, so instead, I’ll pretend you belong to some mediocre musician who neglected you. Someone is responsible for your leak, after all, and that sticky D-button. Perhaps you were shut up in an attic for years upon years, sitting alone in silence, longing to be filled with music.
Now you have to endure my playing; I show up half asleep and play you like a zombie, using the bellows halfheartedly, and staring into space every thirty seconds. You are very patient with me — thank you for letting me drape my arms over you and rest my head. You make an excellent pillow.
Even good days of practice are made up of mind-numbing finger exercises. You find them boring too, don’t you? But yes, you’re right, they are necessary. They make those moments possible… the moments when we’ve learned a song well enough that fingering and bellows come naturally, and we can just play.
We play like one person: you breath and sigh as I do, you share my emotion and then release it into music.
I’m not always comfortable with this form of expression. I prefer communicating with tidy, specific words that are easy for my mind to grasp. But when we play, you carry me out of my comfort zone and to a place that is not quite tangible, not quite understandable… and very beautiful.
I’ll bring you outside today,
Your Accordionist
