the
frequently-performed repertoire, because it's sort of a half-fledged
concerto for viola. Not the violin or the cello--the viola: underdog
of all orchestral instruments.

My daughter Jenny wasn't always a violist. We started her out right on
the violin--something I considered a respectable instrument for a young
lady. My ex-wife and I had faint hopes that someday she'd be a concert
violinist--Jenny was that good from the time she picked up her first
quarter-sized fiddle. We spent a fortune on expensive teachers, and as
soon as she was ready, we started her on the long track: youth
symphony. But just after her fourteenth birthday, something happened
to her brain. I don't mean a pre-mature stroke or some kind of lesion.
She came home one day with this hideous dreamy look in her eyes, and
she puttered around the kitchen nervously helping me cook. She wasn't
talking very much.

I didn't want to probe, figuring she'd tell me what was on her mind
when she was ready. "I have to go to Milan next month," I said, trying
to be cheerful.

She was tearing lettuce leaves into microscopic fragments, and she
looked up. "Will you see Grandma?"

Jenny meant my mother--fountainhead of all family quirks. As a
bright-eyed Italian girl of seventeen she married her American
sweetheart and came to the States. It turned out to be a terrible
marriage, and years later, after dutifully raising four kids, she
divorced my father, American style, and went home to the Old Country.
Jenny had only met her a few times, but when they did meet you couldn't
pry them apart.

"Uh-huh. I thought I might take you along, if you can stand it," I
teased. I pulled the salad bowl away from her and tossed in the tomato
I had been cutting. "We'll leave the day before spring-break."

She brightened a bit at that, and with a very limp wrist, laid a whole
leaf of lettuce on top of the chopped tomato. "Can we stop in Vienna?"

"Oh, I don't know, Jenny... Maybe for a day or two."

She put on a weak smile. "Can we go to the opera?" she asked softly.
Jenny's enthusiasm for opera was phenomenal. She must have inherited
that from my mother, too--I always thought half the reason she went
back to Milan was because they did too many German operas in San
Francisco.

"Only if you can drag Grandma along." I picked up the salad and two
bowls, then waltzed away toward the dining room.

Over dinner she made her momentous announcement. I had just p