Why didn’t my Father play the violin more often?

I could answer that question if people asked it about me. “Why don’t you play the violin more often?” I would say, “Because I never did, and I can’t.”

But my Father did, and he could. So why…?

And then I think about parents, and all people really, who have their own lives that we don’t know about, certainly their lives before we knew them and before we were born.

There are a lot of things about my Father that I never knew, some of which I’m still just finding out, and some I’ll never know.

Like the fact I learned, long after his death, when his brother-in-law, also now dead, told me how my Father (I never called him Dad) was the Lord of the Campus in High School and they called him “The Babe.” I don’t think I would have suspected that.

I only heard him play the violin once. I had seen the case, and wondered about it.

We were on a camping vacation in King’s Canyon just below Yosemite, which was farther and would have cost more, but had the same trees. We had our tent up, we’d eaten our camping dinner, it was getting dark, and I wandered just a little way into the trees to explore, and now it was too dark to see anything and I thought I’d better get back to camp where there was light and safety.

Out of nowhere through the dark came the unearthly sound of a violin, beautiful, remote, impossible, and there was nothing but the music and the dark. I didn’t move. The sound was all around me. Clear, disembodied, magic. I imagined people at their scattered campsites lifting their heads and listening through the dark.

I followed the sound through the darkness, and there was my Father, playing his violin. He finished the melody and put the violin away back into its case. No one said a word.

I never heard him play again.

And he had gone to college, university, Fordham which is highly respected, and he majored in English, like I did, and got a Degree and taught High School some, but he didn’t talk about it and never said why he stopped. I can only speculate.

And then he went to UCLA graduate school to go straight for the Doctorate, and I think made an impression because they let him teach some classes, but didn’t pay enough to live on with a family, so he dropped out, never finished the Doctorate, and got a steady job with a pension, carrying mail. And I never really knew what he studied and learned and taught.

Which would have been of special interest to me because I majored in English and taught high school, and I’m pretty happy to talk about it, only somewhat reluctant.

I wanted to read the college papers he wrote, and what he thought about the things I was reading, and about what I wrote.

Maybe people just assume that other people wouldn’t be interested. And I was too well-brought-up and shy to ask him or tell him. “Yes, please,” and “It’s not just because I’m very interested because I want to see what you wrote, but also because I love you more than I’ve ever been able to say, and I want to get to know you better.”

So it’s not just his “unknown secret life,” and it’s too late now, but as I go through boxes of stuff that were his memories and now I can partly piece together in scraps to be memories I can share, it’s still not enough.

Never enough.