Sitar in the House

I forgot to mention that on Wednesday there was another free Bach concert over the lunch hour. They are trying to do one per month, although the January one had to be canceled due to weather and has yet to be rescheduled. This is the first one I’d been to where the bouncy founder did not sing, or speak, or even appear to be there at all. Listening to all that gorgeous music made me think that God must want us to be joyful. Not “happy” as in everything goes our way, but rejoicing in all the beauty He has given us, in the natural world and in inspired art. If art does not make a person joyful, three guesses who inspired it.

A few weeks ago Kathbert had emailed me to say there was a sitar for sale on Craig’s list, so I forwarded the link to Travalon, since he had always said it would be cool if I could play the sitar. More specifically, he would like me to be able to play “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles and “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones. He was like yeah, that’s cool… and then after some time had passed, Kathbert sent the link again and noted the price had come way down. So I informed Travalon, and last night he came home with a sitar for me. It is a fifth anniversary present. Before we had time to look at it, we had to run over to the co-op for their $5 community dinner of tamales, black beans, salad, and a surprisingly tasty gluten-free cookie, since they were only serving it for 45 more minutes. Once we got home, I inspected the sitar and found it seems to be a pretty high-quality instrument. A printout in the case described how to tune the sitar, but it currently does not seem to be tuned that way, nor does it have the same number of strings as described in the printout. However, when I strummed the strings, it did sound like a sitar. It really has a very cool, otherworldly sound to it. We listened to some songs on YouTube, including the aforementioned ones, to hear what a well-played sitar sounds like. It may be a long, long, long time before I sound like that.

Famous Hat