Pitch imperfect

Of course--of course--there's an online tuning fork. I found it last night. Only an A, but it was enough for me to tune Maisie's violin. The A is on a loop, so you get a bell curve of sound, enough for tuning, and zoning. I did both last night--let the thing loop for half an hour after the violin was put away. Can't give you any rational explanation.

When I was 12 I switched to my second piano teacher--Jeff Goldstein. He lived with a guy named Eric in a run-down, charming cottage in the woods. Eric was an artist; he converted a shed into a stained glass workshop, and one day gave my mother a beautiful butterfly, which hung in our kitchen for years and years. (I've only recently revived it--coming across it in a drawer somewhere.) Eric was the quiet, balanced one.

Jeff slept on a futon beside an enormous grand piano. He was a maniac. Depressive--really depressed--and incredibly talented. Tall and lanky with wild black hair and crazy eyes. And wire-rimmed glasses. He loved my mother; she is a natural therapist, without a therapist's long-term patience: he'd tell her his woes and she'd counsel no-nonsense action. He never did act: he liked the telling better than the resolution. You could tell she comforted him.

I did not comfort him. I had a bit of a crush on him--turned out ten years down the road that he was my type. His rumpled bed, beside the piano, made me anxious. He'd look at me funny and I would cry. I cried all the time during lessons. I'd arrive there so wound up that one day my shoulder bumped a lamp and it wobbled, and I caught it before it fell but it jarred me enough that...I cried. "Why does she keep doing that?" he moaned to my mother, right in front of me. My mother said nothing. He thought I was wasting my gift; I practiced reasonably often, but not as much as he'd hoped. He told me one day that God hands out these gifts to a few people, and that I was squandering mine.

And then there was the day I played one of Bach's Inventions and Jeff ran to get Eric and then told me to play it again, for Eric. Which I did, nervously; good performances are so often dumb luck. But it came out well a second time. Jeff threw his hands in the air and kissed the top of my head. Eric smiled at me; he wasn't one for words. Dodged that bullet.

Jeff gave me an A tuning fork one day. "I want you to memorize this sound and hum it for me," he said. You can learn perfect pitch.

OK, so you try it. Give me an A. Right now. Then click here and see how close you were:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~mervmcl/page5/

I was perpetually flat. Shot in around a G--sometimes an A flat. I can pick an A out of a lineup, but I can't generate it myself.
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