Making Music

Making Music

Due to life's sometimes unfavorable organizing principles, our sister
found herself living alone in Duluth, a town in the north of the
country. She was a skilled musician but instead of trying to make money
playing music, a lifestyle that would, our sister explained, have
encouraged her suicidal tendencies, she decided to make acoustic
guitars and live near her fire instead of in it. Duluth was her home
until mid-November, 1989, when she took her own life by leaping into
Lake Superior from the highest cliff on the North Shore. We found a
note inside the body of the last guitar she was working on that read,
Guitars cannot play music. A local psychologist who was summoned to
investigate the crime and to verify the note said that it was not a
suicide note but rather an expression of desire, thus assuring us by a
subtle shift in definitions a good return on her life insurance policy.
Her death became officially known as an accident. Just two weeks ago I
read in the newspaper that the same psychologist investigated the
suicide of a guitar maker from Vancouver who had leaped to his death in
the Pacific Ocean. After a day into the investigation, the psychologist
made a public statement that he was withdrawing himself from the
investigation and from psychology in general because of conflict of
interest. He then married the guitar maker's sister.