On my seventh birthday, my parents threw a surprise party for me. Everyone came: my relatives, my neighbors, my relatives’ neighbors and my neighbors’ relatives. Halfway through the party, the adults began to pester my grandfather to break out his accordion. My Grandmom Bogle, was a huge fan, and Grandpop Tryanski was always happy to oblige. He had a regular line up that featured everything from the “Blue Danube Waltz” to the “Too Fat Polka”:
“I don’t want her you can have her, she’s too fat for me . . .” (audience participation)
In the middle of the “Too Fat Polka”, my mom snuck up behind me carrying a homemade cake that she had cut into the shape of a bottle-nosed dolphin (“Flipper” was my favorite TV show), and as she surprised me with this one of a kind birthday cake, my grandfather transitioned seamlessly from the “Too Fat Polka” into his personal rendition of “Happy Birthday” arranged for the accordion.
Everyone sang; I blew out the candles and opened my presents; it was a perfect day. Little did I know it would be the day on which I would suffer the first of many irreversible childhood traumas. In many cultures, females are the ones that really suffer. They face awful rites of passage, the injustices of arranged marriages, and the unspeakable horrors of genital mutilation. But as a young, Polish, accordion-playing male, I endured each of those horrors before I was eight. As my sister and I were scrunching up wrapping paper and separating cards from their envelopes, my Grandpop came walking towards me carrying a large, heavy, wooden suitcase with a huge bow on the front.
“Here you go, Bobby,” he said. “This one’s from me.”
I don’t know what I was thinking as I reached out to take the suitcase, or what I was thinking when I squatted down to open the suitcase, but I do know what I was not thinking. I was not thinking, “Step away from the suitcase! Do not open the suitcase! If you think jack-in-the boxes and clowns are scary, just wait until you see what is waiting for you inside of that suitcase.”
I popped the locks; I opened the lid, and there, inside the case, hidden under a blanket of blue velvet, sat a hideous monster with a collapsed lung and no sign of a pulse or the will to live. They called it a “starter accordion”- twelve buttons, twenty-five keys, one set of bellows between the two of them. Say goodbye to childhood and any hope of ever being able to make a baby.Now, I would be lying to you if I said the accordion wasn’t beautiful. It was pearly white, trimmed with polished chrome and gold accents. The major keys looked like they were made of ivory; the minor keys and chord buttons looked like gold bars and nuggets. It was hideously beautiful- the pimpmobile of musical instruments. But beauty masks the ugliness that lies beneath and that ugliness was the torture that took place when I tried to play the damned thing.
If you never played the accordion as a child, you can’t possibly understand the opportunity costs. You probably played conventional instruments, socially acceptable instruments- the violin, flute, clarinet, or trumpet. Playing those instruments will get you into the junior high school marching band. Playing the accordion gets you into the Mummers Parade.