Getting Jane fixed

In 1971 my grandmother gave me a string bass for Christmas.  The previous summer I had started to pick it up while at band camp, and I wanted to play with the stage band during the school year.  The bass she found for me was was a King made sometime around 1940, one that belonged to the town optometrist, who used to play in pickup party sessions, but he hadn’t done in some time.  Part of the reason he stopped playing was that one night he got drunk and fell over with the bass, cracking its neck and putting a hole in its side.  When I got it, its condition was rough:  the neck, the hole in the side, a dinged front, assorted chips from life as the equivalent of a barroom instrument.  However, my band director had a recommendation for someone in Abilene he thought could get it into playable shape, and more or less that happened—it had a really high action and took a King Kong grip to play, but I managed to get some music out of it.  Because of its overall shape and size, I named it “Aunt Jane.”

I played Jane mostly at home and at parties, using the school’s own bass (a Kay) for performance.  When I went to college I took her with me, and she lived either at the Episcopal students’ association or in my closet for the next several years.  It was in that closet that her next disaster happened:  the Memorial Day flood.  Jane sat in two feet of water for several hours, devastating her glues.  Afterward, my college chaplain found money from somewhere to let me take her in and get her re-glued, which saved her body but did nothing to help her neck.  Afterward I stood her in various corners of the apartments and houses where I lived, and let her just sit for years.  I didn’t really have anywhere to take and play her, and she was so hard to play that it wasn’t worth it to me to try.

Fast forward to this year.  My mother-in-law’s holiday check, which she sends instead of trying to guess at presents for us all, was especially generous and after everything else was taken care of, there was still several hundred dollars of “mad money” left, so I decided this was the year that I finally did something about getting Jane fixed if she could be fixed at all.  I hauled her down to Violins Etc. and let them shake their heads and cluck over her condition, but in the end they thought trying to fix her would be worth the money.  So I left her there with instructions to call me if it looked like the repair bill was going to run over $500, and they said “okay, check back with us in one or two months.” And that’s what I’m going to do.