Trombones and Figs
He sat at his drawing board copying trombone parts for his latest orchestral piece. The premiere was in three months. He was behind schedule.
He remembered an apocryphal story about Beethoven. A friend encountered the maestro in a café in Vienna at a back table. Beethoven had a score in front of him. The master was copying parts.
The friend wrote in the conversation book of the deaf master, “What are you doing, Maestro?"
“Trombones,” roared Beethoven, shaking ink from his quill pen onto the floor.
He looked out the wire glass window of his Brooklyn studio. On the fire escape was a fig tree planted in a large pot. Raindrops fell on the leaf buds. To him it was a special plant. Its grandparent had been an immigrant from Italy. An Italian peasant brought it with her on the boat from Calabria in the 1900's. He planted a cutting from this immigrant tree before it was torn from the earth by urban progress. All his friends thought this story apocryphal, but they ate his figs, which retained the sweet bitterness of Calabrian sunshine. In his head, trombones played in the rain.
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Author's Note
A true though apocryphal story.
A chemical storm in the brain, like music and paintings and the poems Plato feared.
Long live finely spun apocrypha! *
* Trombones, Beethoven, figs, rain, Italy—you've put together (with style) some of my favorite things, here.
Good one. I just picked up a box of big paper clips the other day, which had tri-lingual text on it. Did not know that the French refer to big paper clips as--trombones.
Made me think Tom Waits with a party in his head. Enjoyed this piece.
This piece makes me remember when I first heard "Eroica". That's a very good thing.*
Thank you Gary, Mathew, Nonnie, Con, Sam and Amanda for commenting and favs. I'm not sure it's a story, flash or ??
As one reader e-mailed me: "Too long for haiku." Probably apocryphal.
Keep writing my friends.
I like this. It's short but filling. My favorite. *
Feels like an arranging of details, like an intimate chamber piece.
Thank you Felicia and Oliver for reading and commenting. You both make good observations.
Man I like this.
Man I like this.
Steven-Thank for reading and liking it twice!!
Quote me in future correspondence. Meanwhile, I heard Ludwig on the radio earlier today and could whistle to it well. Some named historian man-boy of our age claimed that Beethoven had drunk from a lead cup to account for something amiss about Beethoven's life on earth. What latterday bull. I had read in a book written by a Canadian couple, psychoanalysts, that Beethoven suffered, in addition to deafness, manic-depression. He raised his nephew. Society people commanded him to beat his nephew, and Beethoven refused. Also, Beethoven wrote the word "fart" in fending them off in mail and lost their favor. An archaeologist—same as the historian?—went to the site of Beethoven's grave and reportedly undug Beethoven's lead cup. Once, when Beez and I were visiting D.C., Beez saw MDW after many years and said, almost so that MDW could hear him if he wished, "He has Beethoven hair." MDW has since {possibly} claimed that he never met me. He certainly acts that way online. We both earned master’s degrees in Binghamton. MDW’s dad was a theology professor at GWU. I had heard from DMik that the chair of my third university was sporting Chopin hair, unrelated to the other description of men's hair profiles. I had told my amazingly GIFTED nineteen-year-old student at Lund's coffee shop in Minnetonka near the Hopkins border that he looked like van Gogh with both ears. That was before history had updated collectors and the rest of us that van Gogh had been killed by gun-toting teen aged boys who had shot at him in the field where he painted and that van Gogh, who, now it is said, died of the wound, had wished to protect the teens if he died by claiming self-afflicted shot. History is news. The South of France must hold its perfectly accurately news like a crypt. I cut Tony's hair once. It had grown scraggly. I wanted him to see it kempt yet with some length, in case he liked it, instead of as short, as his non-alimony-collecting wife expected it to be in case he wanted to see his children. I felt that if Tony didn't like it kempt with some length, he could go to his barber. After I had carefully cut it, he left the building to buy a newspaper, after not having left his apartment for some days, and Sam, the strongest and the day doorman said, "Who cut your hair?" I had thought it looked nice until then, when I realized it looked good but like Ben Franklin hair. Anyway, about this brief piece, I'd term it prose poem. There is more to say about figs and green olives. Once, in preparing for a visit to my home from Ned, I went to Trader Joe's and asked a stocker where the green olives were, and the stocker led me to a shelf of canned olives. He pointed to the green ones, the best green ones, he said, he'd ever tasted. I believed him. So I bought those and served them, hoping to float them, in Ned's glass of Peroni. Our eyes laughed over it. Ned shrugged politely and said, "They taste like canned black olives.”*
Ann-Thank you for the long and interesting observations of revisionist history/archeology/psychology and whatever the desperate-for-tenure,fame,fortune or viral UTube presence feel is fact. i.e. if I rewrite the Wiki article and then quote it, I'm now the recognized revisionist expert. Give me tenure. I say to them: "Quit your fucking job and see if you can live on your wits and talent."
"Trombones and Figs" is the first flash in a book of flashes and micros I'm hoping to publish soon titled: "Too Long for Haiku." The only issue I have is: Why are my flash fictions so dark?
Thanks again wise friend.
Good one, Daniel. Sounds like you have a good book in the making! *
Thank you Brenda for your encouragement.