The call...

I'm dialing the phone. It rings.

“Hello?” says mum.
“Heeey, it’s me.”
“Oh hey, love, what’s up?”
“Um, oh nothing much…” I stammer. “We ummm…took the cello in for a quote today.”
“Oh? How much?”

I hesitate and glance down at the itemized quote for the work we’re having done on the cello as a family birthday present to my sweetie.

“Twelve hundred dollars.”
“Wow…”
“Yeah, it’s a lot,” I quickly add, “but it needs to have a lot of work done, a lot more than we thought.”

Why again, exactly, did I volunteer to call mum with the news?

I begin listing off laundry list of what needed to be done: installation and parts cost for the endpin, tailpiece, bridge and strings. The cost of the body work including a cleaning and fill of chips and scratches, a rebuild of a broken tip near the lower left f-hole and a build up of areas with more serious edge wear, plus repair a spot where the seam is coming undone. Oh, and a restring of both bows and an ivory tip overlay for one of them.

“So does it have to be done all at once?”

I mentally separate the work that needs to be done together.

“It’ll be $400 less if we don’t do the body work right now and just do the parts.”
“So is the cello still with you?”
“No, we left it at the shop. They’ll need it for three weeks.”
She’s does the mental calculation. “Oh, so we need to do the work now for it to be done before the season starts.”
“Um, yeah. Pretty much.”
“Ok, let me call dad and call you back.”

I hung up and sighed. I had predicted $800, my sweetie said $600 (and boy, did I want to believe him, but having played violin for four years back when I was a kid, I totally didn’t). When we actually got to the shop and started taking a closer look, there were some real hot spots where if we didn’t get them taken care of soon, it could cause way more headache (and wallet-ache) later. Plus, it hadn’t had any significant maintenance work done in a very long time.

Understandably, it would be less of a strain to do the work over a period of time. But personally, I just wanted to take the hit and contain trauma to a finite period of time rather than dragging it out. Plus, it would be nice to have it over with, rather than dragging it back and forth to the shop. Besides, I look at it as more of an investment. Music is one of the most important things in his life, and while his family is very important too, well, let’s just say that one of those things keeps him more sane than the other…

Besides, I get to watch him play for the rest of my life.



See? That's totally hot. (he shaved the goatee, so now he looks more like Ross Boatman)

Mum didn’t leave us in suspense for long. Turns out dad thought it was going to be more than that, so she told us to go ahead and get all the work done.

Yeeesssss.

They have my undying gratitude. They’re getting both dinner and brunch made the next time we’re up!