Considering the Accordion
Al Zolynas


The idea of it is distasteful at best. Awkward box of wind, diminutive,
misplaced piano on one side, raised Braille buttons on the other. The
bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a
Victorian sick-ward. A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo
thing-a-me-bob. I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right away I
had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a
bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became an unheard of contradiction: a
gypsy in graduate school. Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the
soul in the most unlikely places. Once in a Czech restaurant in Long
Beach, an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old
favorites: "Lady of Spain," "The Saber Dance," "Dark Eyes," and through
all the clichés his spirit sang clearly. It seemed like the accordion
floated in the air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in
Prague or some lost village of his childhood. For a moment we all
floated—the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the
wine, the sacrificed fish on plates. Everything was pure and eternal,
fragilely suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of
a bombed out church.