oh a sad story
Jan. 30th, 2020 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I remember now what else I was going to talk about in this morning's entry.
My banjo teacher.
So, he's a lovely, weird due, with a deeply weird, lovely family. He's from Ohio, his wife is aggressively friendly and strange and from Wyoming, his kids are like 12 and 16 and rambunctious and deeply bizarre, in the normal manner of teenagers, and they all just seem like lovely and extremely eccentric people.
His dayjob is working with developmentally-disabled folks, largely kids, in some sort of educational capacity, I didn't really catch the whole thing. So he knows a lot about styles of learning, and I'd thought he was a musical educator but no, that's his side gig. He told us a great story about teaching some kids music theory with the steps to their basement, since there were twelve of them. Anyway, he's great.
From the beginning, we've noticed that he has a bad tremor that seems to affect both hands, but the right one moreso. He's got a worn spot on the heads of all his banjos, because in Scruggs ("Three Finger") style you play with your littlest, or last two, fingers planted on the head and move only the other three, and in his case, the planted finger often shakes and drags along the banjo head. It doesn't make much noise, and doesn't matter, but it is noticeable; he very occasionally strikes a string he didn't mean to, usually while he's demonstrating something, though given the wall-of-sound nature of the bluegrass banjo, as long as he's fretted properly it doesn't really matter.
He's mentioned it, a time or two-- explaining that it's hard to type, etc., and he's drawn us diagrams and it's always such a hassle I tend to try to come prepared so he doesn't have to-- and he's got it set up so a lot of stuff, he can just print whatever it is out on the printer. But he's never explained much about it, and we never asked because why would you ask about that? He just said at one point that he was glad he wasn't a surgeon or something, and that it hasn't gotten in the way of his banjo or dobro playing yet.
But last night at the session he explained, to me but partly to the other two guys there too, with whom I think he was vaguely acquainted, that the tremor is progressively getting worse and he expects he doesn't have a very long time left in which he'll be able to play, so he's trying to play as much as he can now, and is recording stuff because that'll be what he's got left when he can't do it anymore.
This might explain somewhat why he was so unconcerned about how much our lessons cost-- he charges me and Dude the same whether one or both of us comes, with the reasoning that it's the same amount of time/work for two as for one. But it's grim to contemplate. He's not that old a guy, maybe in his early 50s at the latest.
He said toward the end of the session that they're not sure what's causing the tremor but it seems likely that it's Parkinson's.
I'm just so sorry to hear it. I hope by "not long" he means like, ten years, because we've been taking lessons a year already and we need a lot more work.
My banjo teacher.
So, he's a lovely, weird due, with a deeply weird, lovely family. He's from Ohio, his wife is aggressively friendly and strange and from Wyoming, his kids are like 12 and 16 and rambunctious and deeply bizarre, in the normal manner of teenagers, and they all just seem like lovely and extremely eccentric people.
His dayjob is working with developmentally-disabled folks, largely kids, in some sort of educational capacity, I didn't really catch the whole thing. So he knows a lot about styles of learning, and I'd thought he was a musical educator but no, that's his side gig. He told us a great story about teaching some kids music theory with the steps to their basement, since there were twelve of them. Anyway, he's great.
From the beginning, we've noticed that he has a bad tremor that seems to affect both hands, but the right one moreso. He's got a worn spot on the heads of all his banjos, because in Scruggs ("Three Finger") style you play with your littlest, or last two, fingers planted on the head and move only the other three, and in his case, the planted finger often shakes and drags along the banjo head. It doesn't make much noise, and doesn't matter, but it is noticeable; he very occasionally strikes a string he didn't mean to, usually while he's demonstrating something, though given the wall-of-sound nature of the bluegrass banjo, as long as he's fretted properly it doesn't really matter.
He's mentioned it, a time or two-- explaining that it's hard to type, etc., and he's drawn us diagrams and it's always such a hassle I tend to try to come prepared so he doesn't have to-- and he's got it set up so a lot of stuff, he can just print whatever it is out on the printer. But he's never explained much about it, and we never asked because why would you ask about that? He just said at one point that he was glad he wasn't a surgeon or something, and that it hasn't gotten in the way of his banjo or dobro playing yet.
But last night at the session he explained, to me but partly to the other two guys there too, with whom I think he was vaguely acquainted, that the tremor is progressively getting worse and he expects he doesn't have a very long time left in which he'll be able to play, so he's trying to play as much as he can now, and is recording stuff because that'll be what he's got left when he can't do it anymore.
This might explain somewhat why he was so unconcerned about how much our lessons cost-- he charges me and Dude the same whether one or both of us comes, with the reasoning that it's the same amount of time/work for two as for one. But it's grim to contemplate. He's not that old a guy, maybe in his early 50s at the latest.
He said toward the end of the session that they're not sure what's causing the tremor but it seems likely that it's Parkinson's.
I'm just so sorry to hear it. I hope by "not long" he means like, ten years, because we've been taking lessons a year already and we need a lot more work.
