Bye-bye to the banjo as new flute banishes funereal blues

Last year two friends gave me a banjo for my birthday. But it sat in its swanky black case for a year getting dusty. I tried plucking a few strings, but I could barely tune them. I thought maybe depression had killed my appetite for music. And I felt I was too old to master a banjo, but it didn’t feel good holding onto a musical instrument that was never played.

Then one evening in July, during the Mooney School, I was sitting outside Berry's Tavern with a folk singer from Scotland who was sharing an uncommonly beautiful version of Mary Hamilton with a circle of other musicians, when a woman from Paris sat down beside me. After a few more songs she pointed at the banjo on the ground and asked did I play.

I said the banjo is for sale, and she looked at me as if she had just met Santa Claus.

“I never owned an instrument in my life,” she confided, “and I have been thinking for a long while that I would love to play a banjo.”

I encouraged her to examine it, and I saw her reach down and open the case, and take the banjo up with such reverence that as her delicate fingers caressed the strings I knew that the banjo had found it’s true home.

For the rest of the evening she never let it go. Other people sang, and played, and drank, but she just sat beside me, bent over the instrument, like a mother enfolding a newborn child.

Ball of money

Before closing time she had slipped me a ball of money, which left me poised to visit the music shop the following morning and put my hands on a Sam Murray flute that I had been admiring for a long time.

But even the flute remained in its case, untested for weeks. I just wasn’t in the mood to play.

And I was busy attending funerals all summer, which I suppose is inevitable at my age, but it’s not easy to come back from a graveyard and take up a flute to play jigs and reels. So by the end of August the new flute box was gathering dust.

Then one day I went to the funeral of a musician.

On the night before the burial I was in the wake house, where the widow took each mourner by the hand and told the story of how her partner had died; she had been watching the weather forecast on the television at the time.

He went into the kitchen at the commercial break during the news to make tea. And he was wearing his new runners, which she bought him the previous week. She was always encouraging him to exercise, she said, but the new runners were a size too big so he used them as slippers, in order to save her the trouble of going back to the shop since she was never good at keeping receipts.

Dead on the floor

He told her he was going to phone their son in Dublin later in the evening, after the news, but the news was over when she eventually went into the kitchen to see what had happened the tea and found him dead on the floor.

When each mourner arrived she went through the story again, as is the custom. Sometimes she edited the details. Sometimes she extended a paragraph, bending the narrative towards the comic or tragic, depending on which mourner she had in her hands. When a priest arrived she scrapped the entire scenario and just said, “Do you know father, he was devoted to morning Mass.”

Great send off

It’s amazing how much consolation people get in the telling of any story, but especially in the narrative of loss and lament for a dead lover.

I met her in Dunne’s Stores, a week later, in the aisle where ladies find toiletries.

“I don’t know who I am without him,” she exclaimed.

“You must find that very painful,” I suggested.

“No,” she said, “I don’t. In fact I’m in great form. But he got a good send-off. That’s what matters. After the funeral all his friends came back to the house, and they almost lifted the rafters with the music. It felt like he was still in the room.”

That afternoon I finally confessed to my friends that I had sold the banjo. And when I had put the phone down and opened the flute case, I blew into the flute for the first time, and it released a lovely mellow note that filled me with an enormous sense of exhilaration.