Abbreviated Song List #3: a Digression

All I want this year for Christmas is a cello. I, Tiresias, realize that having a cello would mean I would have to get rid of my seeing eye dog, who is about the same size as a cello. A large, sonorous, bulky thing, a cello, awkward, loud, and inefficient, yet so delicate, fragile, ready to shatter at any given moment. (I knew a kid in high school who backed his car over his cello. What can I say?) I was also thinking how nice it would be to listen to the Bach unaccompanied cello suites right now as I type across the table from Cass, in our own gleeful version of playing battleship, in a Starbucks where the rain has made the windows cloud over with a film of moisture. We’re tapping away like the good industrious hobos we are, Eva-style, me in a pink t-shirt and sheer white button-down and Cass in a sky blue tank, black pullover, and aqua-colored earrings.

But I’m not getting rid of my seeing eye dog, as much as she’s a pain sometimes and doesn’t even do her job right and has a fondness for consuming human feces that I can’t beat out of her. And the thought crossed my mind that I could just go up the street to Borders and buy Yo-Yo Ma or Rostropovich ripping and sawing the shit out of their cellos, but I had to pause. What the hell kind of hobo thinking would this be? When you haven’t even listened all the way to your Brahms piano trios and Beethoven symphonies? When you have fifty-two dollars left for the entire week?

It really would be nice to have a cello. I won’t lie. I’m not even asking for top of the line. Decent sound is all I ask. Wouldn’t cost more than a couple thousand dollars. That’s, what, the price of a nice handbag and a tuna melt, right?