Letter from Vermont

A classic small town moment around lunchtime today.  Our friend Dick Kirby dropped by unannounced in that special way of his.  Dick and his wife Debbie live a couple of miles away from us, closer to the village.  Dick is retired from the utility company, and he and Debbie raise Angora goats on their hobby farm called Kirby’s Happy Hoofers.  All of the most fashionable ladies in Brandon have a pair of Debbie’s ultra-warm mohair mittens, which they wear when walking around the village for exercise or just in the course of running their errands.  Dick brought over two very soft and very warm pairs of socks, not for a special occasion, but as a gift between friends.  This is one of those small-town kindnesses that is so common that you wouldn’t call it special, but so special that you’d never consider it common.

Dick became our friend because my wife is a classically-trained Siberian violinist.  Dick is quite an impresario with his fiddle, and he and his good friends Frank Bunting (retired lawyer, violin and vocals) and Dottie Kline (Brandon’s piano maestro, but more on that another time) have a little group they call “Bows ‘N’ Ivories.”  Their quite-elderly third violin player had recently passed away, and they were looking for a new violinist shortly after we came to Vermont.  Perhaps I might mention that their repertoire tends to show-tunes, sing-a-longs, and generally nostalgic pieces which they perform for community events like Farmer’s Markets, senior center dinners, bus tours at the village inn, and so forth.  

My wife, Olya, is a good 40 years younger than any of them and knows none of the music they play.  Growing up in the Soviet Union and studying music in a formal setting, she hadn’t really heard a lot of numbers from the Great American Songbook, had she?  Still, she was game when he asked, and she’s been performing with them for a couple of years now, broadening her musical horizons from plain old Vivaldi concerti and Tchaikovsky tone-poems towards the more intriguing Tin Pan Alley and Broadway standards that keep the audiences tapping their toes and humming along at their concerts.  Frank leads the sing-a-longs through a paper megaphone and you would absolutely swear Rudy Vallee had come back for the evening.  Once in a while, Olya gets them to try something from her music case … nothing too heavy, you realize, but Bows ‘N’ Ivories does a pretty nice Pachelbel’s Canon now.

So how did a classically-trained Siberian violinist come to live in a small Vermont village?  Some other time, perhaps …