My Grandpa and the Bologna Song

My grandfather was a brilliant musician. While he couldn’t handle his liquor, he lived one step below a state of perpetual poverty, and he died way too early for someone of his passion and age, he had a gift for music like no other I’ve met in my limited lifetime. His instrument of favor was the mandolin, but he was the kind of man who could pick up a musical instrument, turn it over in his hands a few times, blow into it (or run his fingers against the strings, or bang on its surface) and he would have that device mastered in minutes. I’m not kidding about this. I handed him my violin as a child, watched him look at the bow curiously, pluck a few notes on the strings, run the bow across its surface a few times and then managed to actually start playing a novice tune. In an hour, he was composing music on it. After a few hours, you would have sworn he studied under several master violinists for years.

That gift was supposed to pass down to me. My mom was his only child, which meant she was supposed to inherit the talent, but she suffered a little too much in life to ever have the time or discipline to master a musical instrument. She died early, after a life of pain and suffering. Therefore, it was left to me to somehow be the prodigy that should have followed her musical genius of a father.