janet ovenbird Janet wanted to learn Irish fiddle. I was in high school and could play enough tunes passably that she was convinced I could teach her even though I had exactly zero credentials. She was old enough to be my grandmother, and in the years she spent pretending to take fiddle lessons from me, that’s exactly what she became. She showed up at my house every couple weeks and we would go down to the basement and put some sheet music on the stand and muddle through the same set of tunes we’d been working on for months. Janet didn’t make much progress with her fiddle playing. I’m quite certain she wasn’t practicing at home. So we would get absolutely nowhere for half an hour, then she would pay me, then we would go upstairs and have tea and cookies with my mom and laugh for an hour. Janet was a terrible student and a wonderful person—kind and funny, with an empathetic warmth you can only get from meeting life’s darkest emissaries and surviving. She loved me as if I were family and even when I moved to the other end of the country we kept in touch, though she stopped attempting to play the fiddle. When I saw her last she was living in a retirement home with a view of the river and was very much herself, still mentally sharp, still laughing easily and finding delight in her days. Before I left she asked me if I would do something for her. “Of course,” I said. She pulled out her violin from beneath the sofa. “Would you tune it for me?” she asked. So I did. We only needed the idea of music to bind us, just a fleeting thought that maybe, one day, we might still play that set of tunes, just a half formed notion that there was still time. 251029 what's it to you? who go blather from