Long years ago, when D was still at school, I lived with her in the basement apartment on University Avenue, below West Campus. Ithaca is a city of hills: the ground drops away so steeply in places that the city fathers in their wisdom built stairways instead of footpaths.
One warm, sunny day in early Fall, having spent the morning in the library, I was homeward bound down one of those staircases following a ramble down the Slope. It was about noon, and the day was growing hot. I passed Llenroc and the Boneyard and picked up the stairs. The stairway cuts a Z-track down the hill; as you round the bend, there's a sort of mezzanine—a walled platform of paving-stones jutting out from the hillside and overlooking the street. On the mezzanine, partly blocking my way down the stairs, stood a man playing a marimba.
I can't imagine it could have been a full concert-size instrument. Still, it seemed improbably huge and unlikely in this context—like a subway busker playing a grand piano. The man was about my age, perhaps a bit older. He moved gracefully, bronzed and shirtless in the sun, four mallets dancing over the rosewood bars of his instrument as if by their own volition. The music had a Baroque precision, with a Spanish tinge. I paused on the steps to listen.
He finished the piece, and we talked a little. He was a student at Ithaca College, he said, working on a degree in performance. "Is there much of a repertoire for solo marimba?" I asked. He smiled, and admitted that he was building his repertoire largely from scratch. Much of consisted of his own transcriptions of pieces written for classical guitar; the two instruments, seemingly so dissimilar, share certain tonal qualities—a sharp attack, a swift decay, a way their notes have of seeming to linger in the air even when the instrument is silent.
I forgot his name almost immediately, registering it only as something WASPy and faintly absurd. My memory of the entire encounter seemed suspect, as if I had been drinking (I had not). He was a bright, intense fellow, and if, in retrospect, he seems like a bit of an attention-seeking prick—lugging a marimba across the street and up those stairs is the act of a man begging to be noticed—his talent was such that surely a bit of ego was surely permissible.
Over the years, I have thought often about that strange encounter. It was, it seemed to me, one of those random things that can only happen in the hothouse environment of a college town. But until today, it had never occurred to me to try to find the man on the landing. After some time sifting through Google results (Ithaca College connections apparently run deep in the world of professional marimbists, thanks to the residency of renowned percussion professor Gordon Stout) I think I've found my man. He no longer looks like a surfer, but I'd be willing to bet that the guy on the landing all those years ago was Gifford Howarth.
And by God, he lives just a few towns over, even teaching at Nazareth, right here in Rochester.
Gifford—if you read this, drop me a line. If you are indeed my man, then at the very least I owe you a beer for all the times I've remembered that afternoon and shook my head with wonderment.
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