Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I had to go to the dentist this week and everything was good (yay!) except this one tooth that apparently has a crack in it and needs to be crowned. Boo! Our dentist is in downtown Dover, one town over from Durham where UNH is. I always park just off of Central Ave, which is sort of the main street, even though there is a different street called “Main Street”, and walk a block to the dentist’s office. Between my usual parking spot and the dentist’s office is the building that, until this past summer, was home to Ear Craft Music, a musical instrument store. Ear Craft sold guitars and drums and band instruments to kids in the community for nearly fifty years. We bought a guitar there for Daughter #3 and had Daughter #1’s flute repaired there when she was in her college marching band. I may have gone in there a few more times in the years we have lived here, but I wasn’t a regular. When I walked by it today there was something especially sad about the brown paper completely blocking the display windows that used to display saxophones and basses and all other manner of instruments, and you could see musicians wandering in and out. There was something good about having a musical instrument store in the middle of downtown even if I didn’t use it.
When I was a kid, we lived near my grandfather for a couple of years. We would often go over for Sunday dinner. After we ate, and the grown ups were endlessly talking, my sister and I would disappear down to the basement where my grandfather had a collection of second hand instruments: a banged up piano, an out of tune guitar, a couple of harmonicas, a violin, and melodica, which is a completely bizarre Sicilian instrument. A melodica is a miniature keyboard that requires you blow into a tube to get sound, like an organ. See picture:
That was hands-down our favorite. It was just so weird. I bought one when my kids were little because no one would believe it if I just described it to them. They had a blast with it for a bit, but then forgot about it. They had access to Game Boys and cable TV - my sister and I had the instruments and nothing else, at least when we were there, so I think the instruments loom larger in my imagination.
As far as I know my grandfather didn’t play any of the instruments in any meaningful way. I think he bought them with the idea that he might learn to play one or all of them. I never had a chance to ask him because we moved away when I was still quite young and we didn’t see him many times after that, and by then I was a teenager and didn’t much care what the adults were doing or thinking or dreaming of. Today, I’d like to imagine him picking up a used guitar at a yard sale and dreaming about playing a Sicilian love song to his wife. Or maybe dreaming of taking a harmonica with him out into Boston Harbor on his little fishing board and playing songs to himself while the waves lapped up along the sides. As far as I know, he wasn’t really that kind of guy, but that is the magic that I think instruments have over us when we pick them up: we can imagine ourselves as a little more lovely than we are. We can imagine using the instrument to create something beautiful, and in that process, we would become beautiful ourselves. I think even harboring that dream, even if unfulfilled, inches us a bit more to the lovely.
I played a few instruments as a kid, as most of us do, but I didn’t have the focus to develop any skill with any of them. I can read music, and I can get a few notes out of my old trumpet, and I can plunk out a fairly simple tune on a piano, but nothing you would want to listen to sober (or not sober, for that matter). Nevertheless, whenever I go into a store like Ear Craft, I hear a siren song rising from all of the instruments. They all sing, “Take me home, and we can make something beautiful together,” and lull me into a dream of possibilities. Unfortunately, I know if I brought them home, they would add to the pile of instruments that I have already collected - a piano, a trumpet, an electric guitar, some hand drums, and of course a melodica. Luckily, there are other ways to create beauty - not all of us can be musicians.
When I was the comptroller/chief financial officer for an Army hospital before I transitioned to academia, I remember working for several days to build a streamlined reporting system for our quarterly Review and Analysis, which was a financial and productivity report I gave to the senior leadership. I developed a system of linked reports that, with a few clicks, could pull data from an Access database into Excel, and then the Excel would automatically update a PowerPoint slide deck. The process of building this report had previously taken days of an analyst’s time - I was able to turn it into a couple of minutes. For the early ‘00’s, it was a pretty slick piece of work. After it was done, I asked a colleague in another department who was also a skilled analyst to review the work and make sure it worked. He had been a field guy for a long time and really leaned into that gruff, tough guy identity, but by then he was a number cruncher like me. He sat at my desk and followed the logic of the links, making an occasional, “Oh, I see what you did there” and “uh-ha” statements under his breath for about a half hour, then spun around and said, “Man, that is beautiful. I don’t think anyone other than you or I in this organization would be able to appreciate it, but it’s beautiful.” I don’t know if that was really true, but I swear he had a little tear in his manly eye.
There is something fundamental about the desire to create beautiful things, whether those things are music, art, or the spreadsheet machinery behind a reporting process. As Adam Smith, the intellectual grandfather of modern economics and one of my personal intellectual heroes, once wrote, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” The creation of beautiful things transforms us into something lovely, and the proper object of love, regardless of how imperfect we might be. I think even the desire to create something beautiful is elevating.
So farewell to Ear Craft Music of Dover. It was not just a store that sold musical instruments; it sold dreams and possibilities. It sold the promise of being lovely. I’m sorry to see you go.
OK - happy Sunday! I’ll be back Wednesday with links. As usual, willing good for all of you!
Lovely essay. I've had similar thoughts about the guitar shop on the main street in our town. I worry that the business has lots of sentimental value, but little sales, and that one day I'll see it's shuttered and the community will be a little less vibrant.
Count me as one more person who would have appreciated -- and perhaps shed a tear for -- your Access-Excel-Powerpoint automation. I'm sure that was a thing of beauty.