Ode to my trumpet teacher

Nedo Pandolfi 9/21/09

I was fortunate to spend more than my fair share of time with Mr. Pandolfi in the piano room of his shaded house on Gene Allen road. There were times when I would look forward to our visits and, if I hadn’t practiced much that week, times when I didn’t. I remember Pauline relaying messages from the kitchen and the smile in his eyes belied his authoritative and serious-sounding retorts. I remember leaning on the pool table in the basement, putting a cold mouthpiece to my lips and pushing the first tentative notes of warm-up exercises through stiff valves and a frigid horn and hearing him yell over Dan Boucher absolutely kicking ass on the 3^rd movement of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto upstairs at what could only be called a discouraging tempo,”Jesse, that’s B flat!, B flat my boy!”. I remember playing, refining, and re-playing and re-refining countless scales, slurs and passages from the Arban method which to this day the three middle fingers of my right hand recall autonomously whenever they are put to a flat surface.

More importantly, however, I remember the quality of attention he committed to our time together. I think I remember this particularly because I’ve not encountered it in another since. This attention went beyond simply listening to the timbre, time, pitch and duration of the notes being played, and seemed to encompass his whole faculty and experience in a dedicated instant as if there was nothing outside that room, that space, that moment. He could see and hear things others couldn’t, things beyond words, things that we call music for want of vocabulary, and his genius was in communicating it to others, so they could see too, if only for a little while.

Despite my best attempts to foil him with extraordinary, adolescent ego, he managed to teach me to discover and cultivate the same attention; to attend totally to what is – with all of mind, heart, everything. And for this there are no words to thank him. It is beyond words. Or rather, before words become relevant.

Correspondence

Hey bro,
I know you managed your way back to Prov to get the van but did you find a place of refuge sunday night? Also, could you do me a big favor if you have the time and drop by to give our lawn a trim. It'd be much appreciated. You know how to reach me comrade.

Good day

===

Hi,

I slept for some time on the deck of the fishing memorial in Galilee and some time on the lawn of Eric's grandmother's house after trekking there and failing to find the key to gain access and lacking the energy or presence of mind to find a more suitable place. I did see several shooting stars though and overall it was quite comfortable on the back, though I was shivering off the cold for the majority of the night and didn't get much chance to actually sleep. I also had two memorable dreams; In the first a group of people from a nearby house all came out on the lawn with blankets and we had a jolly good and warm time together gazing at the sky. In the second, two men, armed with black, short-barreled* revolver-fed pistols, kicked me awake and claimed to be defending their neighbors' territory as part of some community-action-watch-coalition program and as I remember there was a moment of actual danger and so fear between my waking and their realization of my inability to offer them threat for lack of arms and confusion as to what was actually going on.

I took the 6am bus in the morning to downtown.

I learned that the comfort that comes with dryness and warmth at night should never be underestimated, though it may be relatively unnecessary from an absolute survival perspective. As a result, I plan to buy some type of very light, inconspicuous and compactible tent w/ matching blanket to ensure absolute freedom with respect to where I choose to sleep in the future. In the affore-mentioned scenario, if I had these items, I could have made my way to the nearest beach and enjoyed a free sleep with wave sounds that the majority, being sub-consciously shackled to beds they feel must always be returned to, very rarely will experience. Any reasonable excuse for the importance of the latter could be considered a design parameter for the former in this experiment.

The discomfort of the evening, in hindsight, was worth the unique perspective gained. Which leads me to consider whether one is capable of enduring any hardship, however perilous - as the major components to be endured, it seems to me, are the expectation and memory of it anyway, and if one sees positivity in useful knowledge gained in memory then does not expectation eagerly look forward for want of such knowledge? Perhaps this is the sort of perspective a Navy Seal must acquire in order to not 'ring the bell' and do the things I've seen them do on countless discovery channel navy seal behind-the-scenes-training programs.

The idea to mow your lawn has set sail in my ocean of consideration, however the tidal wave of the moment is the arrival of my brother - which should happen in 3 hours. I think we should consider all getting together for a campfire and maybe even a boat trip across the bay to Prudence Island in the quahog skiff to test out the above comfort theory of free sleep.

- A handclasp for the miles until then,

*I believe these are also called stub-nosed pistols and maybe even Winchester .38 specials if Tom Clancy novels and Fisherman's Friend catalogs are any guide. In any event, certainly superior in wounding power to my DFW** novel, ipod headphones (which I guess I could have strangled one with if I could endure what would most likely be 6 bullet wounds from the other) and corduroy jacket.

**David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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