Mo' Misty, Wudder-Colored Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man: Some Are Born To Make Music, Others Are Made To Write About It

This is me with my first, and only, instrument I ever learned to play: the violin.

I know what you’re thinking.

Why the violin, Bomb?

That’s a pretty soft-ass instrument, especially for a real hard-rock like yourself!

Trust me…I understand that now.

I did not fully grasp that back then.

And much like many poor decisions a young man makes in the early stages of maturing age, a girl being involved is a safe bet.

The inspiration for my decision to play the violin had a hyphenated, eight-syllable name.

It’s a name that still rolls off my tongue, like a lullaby, thirty years later:
Elisa Niino-Murcia....“Lisa” for short.

Lisa was in third grade; I was in kindergarten.

It was an elementary-school era reversal of the old May/September romantic trope.

It was doomed to fail from the start, much like my career as a violin-playing musician.

Akin to the time my parents let me attend the 1983 Sixers Championship Parade in a red sweatshirt reading “Boston” in blue puffy letters, which made a big-boned woman on Broad Street berate me, demanding to know whether I was a Celtic fan.

Important Editor’s Note (from ‘83 Till Infinity): “NEVER THAT, MA’AM!”

If my folks fully understood Philadelphia sports, or what might drive a child’s decision when coming to musical passion, they should’ve known better than to let me choose violin as my starter instrument.

But back in “my prime”, my decision-making was generally fairly trustworthy.

Not only was I reading by 3, I was going grocery shopping to the Acme, with coupons along with a list of groceries, by 4-5.

Sure, Acme was directly behind our house.

I could push the cart from the front of the store to the last pick-up spot 20 yards from our front door.

Still, I relished this independence, any opportunity to provide physically, if not financially, for our four-member family.

I was around that same age, when I first met Lisa on the back of the school bus.

That bus took kids from Pre-K, all the way up to high school, to the private Quaker-run “Friends” school twenty minutes away, in Moorestown, NJ.

Lisa was from Columbia, not Maryland, or South Carolina, Colombia the country.

At age 9 to my 5, she really was “the fine Columbian” Steely Dan must’ve been singing about.

She had thick, dark black hair that curled up at its ends, big saucer-like eyes of almond-brown, along with an impossibly fresh-face that seemed to actually glow, sorta like Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase, whenever she might break you off a smile in her pleasant company.

Lisa was also a violin prodigy.

She told me she started playing at 2, on Styrofoam violin her father whittled into shape.

Now that I type that out, it feels like either a false memory or ridiculous lie.

Of the former, I certainly have at least one or two.

From the latter, that coulda been the start of more than a few.

Nevertheless, by the time I met Lisa, her musical chops were fully-formed, at least in the only way mattering to my ear at the time: she could play the Star Wars theme on a real violin, a finely hand-crafted wood beauty, wielded like a weapon, for the forces of all-that-could-be-good, tucked under her chin, accompanied by a bow in her right hand.

I’m not sure in the two years Lisa & I spent on that bus together how many times I implored her to play Star Wars.

I was sensitive to not ask every day, since I already had Linda the bus driver playing “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones every time I hopped onto the bus in the morning, then did my move of swinging myself row by row, from the front to the back, by the palms of my hands on each seat.

Best not to push these things incessantly, even a young kid will develop some semblance of restraint eventually.

However many times, I’m sure it was a lot.

And whatever age/grade I needed to reach for Elisa Niño-Murcia to take me seriously as a romantic lead, that’s a stage that I never would reach while in her presence.

Lisa moved to California shortly after I'd graduated kindergarten or first grade, a year before my parents moved me to public.

I can still vividly recall standing out by the playground that day, back in ’83.

I had been telling Lisa all about how I had wanted that red-leather Michael Jackson “Beat It” video jacket, a real one, not that knock-off pleather jawn they were selling to the suckers down at Merry-Go-Round.

Lisa was talking to a friend but upon me unveiling this aspiration, instantly grabbed the back of my head and shoved my face directly into the soft-wool of her navy Paddington Bear-style pea-coat, exclaiming:

“OH MY GOD, MATT! I LOVE YOU, YOU ARE SOOOOOOOO CUTE!!”

The embrace felt weirdly wonderful, but the words rang like a fist to the ear.

I had fashioned myself a Big Dawg, yet here I was, being viewed as a puppy.

This was not the grown zone.

Instead, it was my first foray into the dreaded “Friend Zone”, an arena I’d again visit, usually against my will, more times than I’d care to admit, long after that fateful day.

My experience with the violin continued after the Niño-Murcia family packed their bags for California, which, to a seven-year-old from New Jersey, might as well have been Mars, except with a post office code.

Lisa and I had further correspondence, utilizing something kids now know as “snail mail”, but the thrill was gone, like BB King used to sing, ironically while sublimely assisted by violin strings.

By the time I decided to quit the violin at 10 or 11, prior to middle school, for self-preservation and maintenance of cool, I did not know yet that you could put strings to songs by blues titans like BB King, or make mackadocious bass-voiced bedroom music like Barry White & ‘Dem.

I just knew that my music teachers wanted me to play Mozart.

Meanwhile I longed for that Star Wars theme Lisa played while bow-flowing across the strings of my heart.

Eighties flirtations with stringed instruments or classical forms, feels long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Then again, so did dreams of getting paid to write about it one day.