I suffer regularly from the delusion that I could, given time and practice, learn to be musically inclined. This has been a lifelong delusion and one which still surfaces from time to time. I'm not terrible with music. I'm just no, say, Lindsey Stirling. This never really bothers me, and to be entirely honest, despite the knowledge that I will most likely never be Lindsey Stirling, Itzhak Perlman, Vivaldi, or anything remotely close to a fantastic musician, I continue trying to learn to play the violin.
Almost everyone who learns that at the prize, young age of twenty-two I decided to take up the study of a string instrument tells me how awesome they think my decision is and tends to be, in conversation, demeanor, and support very encouraging. Almost everyone.
I must preface the revelation of those who are not supportive of my musical endeavors by saying that I do not regularly count my cats as people. Not ever. They are not my "children." They are not replacements for regular human interaction. If I had to abandon my home with my handsome and flee, I would be sad to leave the cats behind, but I would if my life depended on it.
I also do not bother, normally, with what my cats do and do not hate. Don't like the discount cat food? Deal with it. Eat it or starve, buddy. Don't like me squirting you in the face with water? Don't jump on the table and steal my sausages. Don't like Brian showing more attention to me than to you when he gets home? Deal with it. I'm his wife. You're a cat. Go lick yourself.
That being said, my cats hate my violin aspirations. Oddly enough, it took me a little while to fully realize this.
I began, as I said, learning the violin when I was twenty-two, a full year or more before I met Brian and two years before we moved into a condo, he left to Afghanistan, and I picked up three kittens for company. In those two years I practiced regularly, often on campus but frequently at home. The latter situation led me to purchasing a mute to prevent my neighbors from storming my home with pitchforks to break all my fingers and demand the destruction of my fiddle. The mute worked very well in this role. To date I've never had any comments from my neighbors. As far as I'm aware, they may not even know I moved in.
But, for those of you unacquainted with string instruments, a mute does not entirely block the sound that is scraped painstakingly from the bowels of the apparatus. The fiddle still sounds exactly as it would otherwise, just quieter. I'm fine with this, since it means that only I or anyone in the same room with me has to endure the horrible scratching and scraping that makes up my violin practice sessions. Even Brian didn't consider leaving me when he returned from Afghanistan to my daily rite of fiddle noise-making. He did, however, comment one day about three weeks into this routine.
"I don't think the cats like your playing."
He said it very matter-of-factly but chuckled, and initially I thought he was joking. I laughed along but didn't think much more of it and kept playing. A few minutes later, Brian laughed some more and said, "They really don't like your playing."
This merited investigation, so I and my fiddle came into the living room to see what the cats were up to. I had previously sequestered myself in the most isolated part of our rather small condominium to reduce the intrusion of my playing on the rest of the house. Even with the mute, the fiddle being right next to my ear keeps me from hearing a great many things going on elsewhere, and I credit this as the reason I hadn't noticed all three of my cats crowded at the bottom of the stairs near the front door yowling for all they were worth.
There are many unusual points about this situation. First, the three cats do not usually congregate all three of them together in any one location peacefully. The social dynamics between them are imbalanced in such a way that any two will occasionally sleep together but it is truly rare for all three to be assembled in harmony. This made me think that the cats were fighting at the base of the stairs, which is also unusual because the cats only go to the bottom of the stairs for three reasons: to access the litter box, to greet us when we return home, or to escape our vengeful squirts when they misbehave. At this precise moment, none of them were using the litter box, Brian and I were already home, and nobody was being squirted with water. Therefore, the cats should not have been at the bottom of the stairs.
Yet there they were. One, two, three. All by the front door. All looking miserable and crouching as close to the floor as they possibly could. I looked down the stairs and the cats just looked mournfully up at me as though asking me if the time of punishment was over and they could return to good graces. I was puzzled. I asked Brian what made him think they didn't like my playing.
"They all start yowling as soon as you start playing. Then they stop when you stop."
I thought he was making this up. I walked back into the living room and played the passage I had previously been working on. The moment my bow touched the strings, my already inharmonious normal noise was expounded upon with cacophonous howling that echoed sharply up the stairs. I stopped. So did the cats. Brian laughed.
"Maybe," I said, "they just don't like Suzuki music." I put bow to string again and dashed off several bars from a jig I was studying. The yowling resumed punctuated with terrible yelps whenever I reached a particularly high note. I didn't know cats could yelp. Brian laughed more.
"Maybe Christmas music?" I tried an upbeat French traditional carol. The cats communicated categorically their very strong feelings that Jesus's birth should not be heralded by a violin. Ever.
"Maybe something calmer?" I scraped away at the few phrases of Silent Night that I knew. The cats loudly begged for silence now.
"Let's try something I'm really good at." This reduced me to playing several variations of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, the only piece I had practiced enough to be able to play without hesitations, scratches, or squeaks. The cats cried more than ever and began scratching at the front door, as though their fears of the outdoors paled in comparison with the certain doom of remaining indoors with a violin-playing Maile.
Having exhausted my repertoire of pieces, I stood rather amazed in the middle of the living room with my fiddle tucked under my arm. I really found it quite incredible that these three ridiculous creatures could take such vehement objection to my musical efforts. I bet Itzhak Perlman never had to put up with this crap.
My prolonged silence had led the cats to believe that deliverance had come. They crept to the top of the stairs and poked their noses cartoon-like one by one around the corner. It seems that not only had I been practicing routinely enough for them to hate my playing, but they had also learned what detestable object produced the terrible din. Their survey of the scene halted abruptly the moment their eyes landed on the fiddle under my arm. Immediately, their ears flattened and they crouched in anticipation of the fiddle moving from its relatively safe location held firm by my elbow.
I glared at all three of them. In a flash I whipped my fiddle to my chin and dashed off several bars of the jig. They were just as quick as I and bolted, yowling all the way, to the bottom of the stairs before I was two bow strokes in.
I will, however, not be bested by three silly felines. I stood deliberately at the top of the stairs and boldly played every single piece I knew by heart. It was probably my best performance to date. This drove them to take the heretofore unprecedented action of cramming one by one into the litter box, the furthest physical location they could possibly be from the fiddling and a location not designed to accommodate three cats at once. Take that, fuzzy-faced jerks.
Our squirt bottles have gotten considerably less usage since that day. If ever I think the cats are being excessively irritating or deliberately rebellious, I just pull out my fiddle. Minor infractions merit Suzuki. Christmas carols are for excessive conditions. And for particularly irksome days, I keep an Irish jig.
Turns out they're fine with me learning guitar, though.
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