There’s something about hearing a violin that enthralls me. Mesmerizing, enchanting, seductive, haunting. Horsehair moving across strings making music like no other instrument I know. If a single violin can move me, a symphony of them can lift me to the heavens.

I have a violin, though I’ve heard not a single note from it. No, wait. I have plucked at its strings a time or two. But that’s all. Its poor bow is hairless - bald.

I do remember a time it had a few blonde hairs clinging to it, but that was a lifetime ago. I was a child meddling around in a high cabinet at our farmhouse. I had opened the cabinet door nearest the floor, climbed up, opened the next door, climbed up and opened the top one near the ceiling.

Even at a young age I had an inquiring mind and the ability to scale tall peaks. That was when I first laid eyes on it.

An ancient fiddle with a frayed bow beside it. Fiddle did it say? Perhaps. Do you know the difference between a fiddle and a violin? Its the music that’s played on it.

Generally, fiddles play folk music. Traditional genres like Cajun or Irish tunes. While violins normally play composition-based genres.

I presume the instrument in that top cabinet never played composition music.

Most likely it played Turkey in the Straw or other folksy dancing tunes.

My father walked in and caught me clinging to the top cabinet, snooping. His main concern was me falling from my perch near the ceiling. I asked about the thing with strings I saw way up there in that cabinet.

He told me it was just a memory from his youth.

He’d been to barn dances and gatherings where people would empty a room in their house, throw down some sawdust, and hire a fiddle player to come in and play for them. At one time he had aspirations of being a fiddle player, too.

So he made a deal. He traded his rifle to a man for that old fiddle. I suppose it was he who wore the bow out trying to learn how to play. Said he never could play anything recognizable on it. Eventually, he tucked it away in that top cabinet near the ceiling and there it sat until I discovered it that day.

And there it stayed for many years afterwards. From time to time I would peek at it sitting up there. The years passed. Eventually I no longer had to climb high to see it. I’d stand in a chair, open the door and gaze at it sitting there.

My father passed away in 1976. When I left the farm a couple years later I took that old violin with me. Like my father I, too, never figured out how to make music with it. And, also, like my father I found a high cabinet in my home to place it in. A relic from our past.

Occasionally I’ll take it down and place it beneath my chin like I know what I’m doing and pretend to play.

Sometimes I wonder about who owned it before my father. I wonder who all had danced to its music; the couples that heard its melodies. If it could talk what stories could it tell? I can imagine my father, a young boy, pulling that bow across the strings of that old fiddle until they were all worn away.

It has to be well over a hundred years old now. My father would be nearly 104 had he lived.

I took it down from the cabinet a week or so ago. I placed it on my desk just to enjoy looking at it for a little while. If I didn’t know better I’d swear it spoke to me. It said, “Remember me? Remember that time your father caught you when we first met?”

Today I placed it back in the cabinet thinking that perhaps someday one of my grandchildren or great grandchildren may take it out and let speak to them. Maybe it’ll even make music for them like it once did a long time ago in its other life. Who knows? But for now it’s tucked away, safe in that high cabinet.

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Rick Algood
April 18, 2020