I was seven and too shy to talk to strangers when I first met Marcello at Johnson Strings. The luthier handed me a bow and stepped away. “Play something,” he said, “A note. A tune. Anything.”
I wrapped my arms around Marcello’s neck and felt my clammy fingertips stick to his gold-wood skin. My right hand wrapped around the slender bow as my elbow rose. The bow gripped the metal strings and slid—a coarse, bullish “D” rang through the room. Like clearing the throat after a lengthy head cold, my voice arrived. Marcello taught me to speak.
I took Marcello home and named it as a pun-loving fourth grader would—my cello, “Mar-Cello” He was a brute among cellos, a barbarian among delicate chordophones. His body was built of cheap plywood that paired gawkily with my carbon fiber bow. I learned what toughness meant as my fingers calloused around the shape of his strings. And we traveled: the two of us sat side by side on long car rides as my dad sped down the wintry Boston I-95. We walked each other into rehearsals in towns far away from home.
Marcello was the temperate, stalwart old chum that held my hand as I braved the wild grounds of adolescence. Then high school arrived. I met new friends and I said yes to dozens of commitments. I found a voice in leadership, obsessed over perfecting my craft in theater and film. Life hurled me forward as I sought to flee from stagnancy, heedless and undaunted. Marcello asked me to pause—to repeat the scales and thumb position octaves I’d been playing since third grade. I decided he couldn’t keep up. So, I kept him behind. On a Saturday two summers ago, I stuffed Marcello into his case and left him in the boiler room of my basement. The decision didn’t feel monumental—I had stopped practicing that summer and dropped out of orchestra months before. Marcello’s strings had already fallen out of tune. His bow’s hair broke out and balded.
Marcello hardly entered my mind in the weeks after. On my way to school the autumn after his basement exile, however, Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Suite began playing on the car radio. Ma struck his first triad—his bow gliding across the strings, a sound effortless to the ear as the voice of an old friend. I turned him down and recalled the chime of my first “D” with Marcello. The old luthier appeared before my eyes. Gosh. What would he think of this abandonment?
I would justify my quitting to him. I wasn’t passionate enough, I would tell the luthier that I was hardly good for my age. There were fifth graders playing Dvořák concertos as my improper bow holding and stiff fingerings barely made their way through a Bach piece. I found new love in playwriting and film, I would tell him. I know how to tell stories. My voice gets stronger each day as it learns to mold around characters beyond myself. I pour myself over the keyboard and onto scripts, ushering those pages onto the stages and screens—this was my calling.
The luthier faded away. Ma struck his last chord as the car pulled into the school parking lot. Moments later, I arrived at the theater for rehearsals and sang a line from Sondheim’s Company. It never gets old, I thought, relishing in the simple delight of hearing my voice reverberate through an auditorium. I forgot, of course, where that voice had come from in the first place
