CONSIDERING THE ACCORDION

        The idea of it is distasteful at best. Awkward box of wind, diminutive, misplaced piano on one side, raised Braille buttons on the other. The bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a Victorian sick-ward. A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo thing-a-me-bob. I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right away I had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became an unheard of contradiction: a gypsy in graduate school. Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the soul in the most unlikely places. Once in a Czech restaurant in Long Beach, an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old favorites: "Lady of Spain," "The Saber Dance," "Dark Eyes," and through all the clichés his spirit sang clearly. It seemed like the accordion floated in air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in Prague or some lost village of his childhood. For a moment we all floated--the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the wine, the sacrificed fish on plates. Everything was pure and eternal, fragilely suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of a bombed out church.   
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