"Hoffman-KeySignatures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

KEY SIGNATURES

AS FAR AS THE SYSTEM WAS concerned, Zita Wilson came into existence one
September morning at 8:56 a.m. when she was about two and a worker found her on
the welcome mat at the Social Services Offices.

At eighteen, she got out from under the system's scrutiny, but she couldn't
escape the sense that she needed more than the food, shelter, and care rough and
tender but never permanent that the system had given her.

Ten years and eight moves later, she arrived in Spores Ferry, Oregon.

Angus's workshop was a basement room with fiddles hanging all over the walls,
and a workbench holding a bunch of blue horsehair, vice grips, and scattered
mysterious tools and bits of wood. The air smelled of oil, glue, and furniture
polish. Angus, a hunched old man with a disarming chipped-tooth grin and
black-framed glasses, pulled a battered fiddle from the constellation on the
wall and handed it to Zita, then equipped her with a bow after tightening the
hairs.

Zita had sung in choral groups at some of the high schools she had gone to. She
could carry a tune. She had even taken piano lessons for a year at one foster
home, paying for a half hour lesson a week with money she got from doing extra
household chores. She had had a sense that music was waiting just beyond her
ability to play, and it saddened her when she had had to move on and lost her
lessons and access to a piano.

Unlike the piano, the fiddle had an infinite capacity to sound horrible, the
piano's capacity to sound bad being limited to how many keys she could push down
at once. The fiddle sounded dreadful as soon as she touched bow to string.

Angus, who told her he had been playing sixty-two years -- "Built my first
fiddle from a cigar box when I was six," he said -- picked up another fiddle and
drew a bow across the strings, sounding a sweet, clear note. "Only difference
between a fiddle and a violin is attitude," he said. "If you were playing a
violin they'd tell you all these things about how to hold this and where to put
that, but in my old time fiddle class I just want you to have fun. If you get a
tune out of it, all the better." He grinned at her and made the bow dance across
the strings. A wonderful bouncy tune jumped out, making her feet itch to jig.

She handed him a hundred dollars and became owner of the battered fiddle, a
beat-up case lined with worn yellow fake fur, a bow, and a lump of rosin.

A week later, Zita went to her first class in the new community. The Old Time
Fiddle by Ear class met seven to ten Thursday nights in the cafeteria of an area
elementary school. Zita had walked into more than enough new situations; she