Not Even Not Traveling 70: Tiny Guitar of Doom

Tiny Guitar of Doom
(A Heartwarming Tale of Forty-Five Adults Failing to Clap in Unison)

Day G

On Friday, the second day of our voyage, I noticed a free ukulele lesson on the schedule of ship events. So did forty-five other passengers. When I arrived in the crow's nest, the twenty-four class seats were full. I had to steal a stool from the bar next door and improvise a place in the back row.

The instructors, a wife and husband team, had brought a crate of brand-new soprano ukuleles. That seemed like a happy event. I hopped up to get mine before they all disappeared.

"You won't get to keep them," warned the instructor, a middle-aged Hawaiian woman. "We will take them back and my husband will tune them all tonight."

The tiny ukuleles had arrived out of tune, and — because their strings were new — they refused to hold a note for more than a few seconds. Strumming on them was easy enough. Trying to confirm the sound of a chord in a room full of forty-five out-of-tune instruments playing at the same time, though, was an intellectual exercise, not a musical one, so much.

I learned to play a simple song in our first hour. That's what I thought; it sure was hard to verify.

Day C

On Saturday, the instructors raised the stakes. They gave us chord charts for "Mele Kalikimaka" and "Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe." They told us we would be performing both songs on the World Stage on the night before docking in Hawaii.

I'd never heard the second song before but it had a hook I found appealing. They were both going to be fun, I thought, World Stage or not. But we weren't given melody notes for either piece. We were expected to memorize the singing by ear, which is easy enough, I suppose. Most of the men had to sing an octave down from the instructor, though, and she sang at a low alto. Maybe a fifth of us could make the octave. One silent man behind me chuckled.

"Sing louder," he told me.

"Yeah," agreed the musician to my right, one of those who had brought his own instrument.

We had two days to learn songs for the concert. Fine. Given the ease of the ukulele, I knew it was possible. I wanted a few other men to sing, though. Plus I couldn't see how the group was going to get the timing of the ukuleles right. We weren't strumming in anywhere close to the same rhythm. We seemed to have a cadre of music students who liked to race to the end.

"We keep speeding up," I complained.

"It's not happening in these seats," said the musician.

"Next rehearsal, maybe they'll chill out." That was my hope.

"Maybe they'll get even more excited," he countered. I gave him some side-eye.

"Everyone likes Flight of the Bumblebee," said the woman to my left. Okay, so it was musical humor of a sort. We turned to her. She tossed back her frizzy, blonde hair and and flashed us both a smile.

Day E

After workout and lunch, I went to my ukulele lesson (ratio: still one teacher per forty-five students) and I sat in the middle row of seats. A man who had brought his own instrument took a spot next to me. In the previous lessons, I'd noticed at least three other musicians who had brought their own. We had musical prodigies in the crowd as well, including a boy of twelve or thirteen. The boy, when he picked up his ukulele for the first time, tuned it in a few seconds and then plucked out all the scales on it by ear. Within a minute, he was playing chords and breaking the chords into components, plucked in syncopated rhythms.

This time, the boy even more real musicians sat next to me. The grown man with the most beautiful concert-quality instrument rested it on his knee, leaned over, and said, "It sounds like you've played ukulele before."

I didn't know what to tell him. I had taught myself one song for a poetry event years back. Could an experienced musician pick up a single experience like that? And do it in a room full of other musicians? I felt like he was making a mistake. But in a nice way. I tried to let him down easy while I heard, to my right, the boy pick out part of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

He was really putting "Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe" in perspective.

After a decent practice, I got nods from a few other folks I knew by sight. One of the gestures came from the military engineer I'd eaten lunch with a couple days earlier. At the time, he'd been severe. He had refused to drink coffee or alcohol. He'd pointedly said that he and his wife came from Utah. Despite his apparent disapproval then, he seemed satisfied with the music. 

His wife had clapped in time when it was demanded. He had not clapped. 

Day A
The Undressed Rehearsal
(It's only a metaphor - we kept our clothes on) 

Our next ukulele lesson panicked me. Our timing, as we strummed, was worse than dancers on a boat in a gale. We were down to forty individuals now but still we had no common sense of time. Half a dozen players kept picking up speed as we played.

The wife and husband instruction team kept arguing. The wife was the leader. She knew her part. She was going to direct the performance. But together, they didn't seem coordinated. They argued for about a third of the class. And they weren't concerned about looking bad on stage. I begged the group to return to the parts we hadn't gotten right. And we did. Still, we didn't nail them. And the instructor was not worried at all.

At dinner, Diane and I hit the Pinnacle Lounge, the most expensive and exclusive restaurant on the ship. Toward the end of dinner, Tim and Wendy sat down at a table nearby. They were our dining mates a few days back and now here they were again.

"I haven't seen you at ukulele lessons," I mentioned.

Tim laughed.

"I've given up on that," he admitted. "We'll do the hula dance. That's our part."

I had to admit, it was a reasonable strategy.

This Chord

Overnight, I practiced for the Hawaiian Cultural Festival. We had been allowed to take the soprano ukuleles to our cabins. Thanks to my wife's generous offer to head to the spa and let me strum, I knew our two songs. I knew I could hit the low notes while singing and keep time with the instrument. As a group, though, well, I remembered our run-through the day before.

Practice, practice. I even practiced the native Hawaiian chant, only one word and a few claps since a Cultural Leader was doing the rest. But I nailed it. 

The next day, I barely noticed my lunch because I was concentrating on the dress rehearsal coming up on the World Stage. 

The Dress Rehearsal

If you opt to learn about Hawaiian culture on a HollandAmerica cruise, you have to be prepared to be part of the show. The Zaandam had four cultural advisors traveling with us. They had taught music, hula dance, and lectured to us about Hawaiian island life. One of them got up on the World Stage and led us in a practice of the opening chant.

A Hawaiian welcoming ceremony had been gently adapted (or so I suspected) for us as passengers. It was simple and friendly. To my surprise, the rehearsal went well. We got our timing right. When we were singing, we took a formation that placed me in the middle. Aside from the men who hadn't sung, there were a few women who felt unsure about their voice roles. In the last rehearsal before this one, I had gently assisted the women’s melody.

"Are you going to sing soprano?" whispered the woman next to me. I knew she meant was I going to softly croon to the female voice line.

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes." She looked at her feet.

I told myself it would be okay as long as I stayed gentle. When the verse came around, I added a quiet line of notes. My ukulele friend and two other women close by nodded in approval. Good, because I needed it.

The Hawaiian Cultural Festival

Well, it helps to perform in front of a friendly audience, which we were definitely doing. We clapped to the traditional chant in the correct rhythm (okay, except for one person). We applauded for the acrobatics and the drumming that took the place of a fire ceremony, which admittedly would be hard to hold aboard a modern ship due to well, fire alarms if nothing else.

We sang Melé Kalikimaka and Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe. Many of us kept time correctly, even. We moved aside to accommodate the hula dancers. But then we sang along to accompany the hula. Honestly, I think we were the least cultured part of the Cultural Festival.

But the audience, composed of our friends and fellow passengers, stood and clapped. And then most of the people hugged, usually with the family member involved in the performance but not always.
 

Not Even Not Zen 431: Aleksi, Note 4 - Oh Yeah, Art

Oh Yeah, Art

In the summer of 2015, Diane and I brought our family on a driving vacation. Our two youngest kids were still interested in traveling with us, so we aimed to take them to new places. We consulted our extended families and acquaintances. We tried Mapquest. After a lot of thought and tracing out the possible routes, I decided I would rather see friends than anything else.

Okay, so I pretty much always would choose to visit friends if I could. It wasn't a one-sided decision. We knew that college friends of mine, Donna and Aleksi, were living north of Toronto with their son, Ensor, who happened to be around the same age as our kids. They all said yes to a visit. They seemed interested, even.

Diane planned our driving route. It was going to be great. Well, the first leg was going to be long. But Canada is, as everyone points out, a lot like a version of the United States where people don't litter. Folks are polite. Geese are aggressive. We made our way along Route 403 to Toronto and then beyond. No hotel for us, this time. At least, not yet. Donna and Aleksi had generously offered to put us up in their home, which is the kind of thing great friends do and most other citizens pretend they would also do if only things were different, like we all owned multiple houses. 

An hour after we arrived, Al and Donna whisked us off to see the sights of Toronto. Ens gave the trip a tolerant smile. We took a train. It was clean. In fact, the art district downtown was fairly spectacular. The conversation was the best part, though. Sharing opinions and memories is what makes friends worth crossing international borders for, maybe.

When we got back to their place, Aleksi settled us in and turned on the kind of television and sound system I'd never had. He asked if he could play us one of his pieces. Normally, I wince when people offer to show me their work - too many writing workshops with bad writers, I guess - but I remembered Aleksi's sense of art in college as being a strong one. He'd shown passion and determination. He'd had ideas about abstract art. He had since then worked his art into Hollywood movies, too, so I knew I was going to see something polished. 

Aleksi dimmed the lights. Music from Bach filled the room. Streaks of light and patterns began to flash on the screen. 

Seeing his animation, feeling it move me, not always knowing quite why I had the emotional responses, feeling my mind go out in unusual directions - this was different but it was familiar, too. This was art.

"This piece played for a while at a German art museum," he said. "It was in the lobby. People saw it as they came in."

"It was for a celebration of Bach," Donna added. 

Next, he played a second piece, another abstract visualization of a sonata. I noticed my kids fidgeting a little during it but not much, not enough for me to worry. Once more I felt the animation move me. It made me remember how Aleksi strongly envisioned his art. It really was art. It had been a long time since I had seen art for the sake of its inspiration, since I had seen it so pure and naked.

This was not commercialized, did not compromise much with techniques or with the need to communicate. It was driven by an inspired vision. Oh yeah, this was the real stuff. This was art.