For my dad's birthday.
He died in 1996. He was more unhappy than he should have been, for large periods of his life, and I don't think I did a lot to make it better, but I did do one thing, indirectly. As a little kid in suburban California, where everybody got free instruments and lessons in elementary school, I was thought to be musically gifted—wrongly, I didn't have the necessary drive and focus, I was doomed to be a great listener—and my parents, who didn't know much of anything about classical music, started getting exposed to it, and my father fell gradually in love, especially with Beethoven (who was deaf and tormented like him) and eventually, after the VA fixed his hearing, Mozart. And later than that, I could make him an old-fashioned with Old Forester and he'd nurse it listening to a Mozart quartet, and that was pretty good.
He died in 1996. He was more unhappy than he should have been, for large periods of his life, and I don't think I did a lot to make it better, but I did do one thing, indirectly. As a little kid in suburban California, where everybody got free instruments and lessons in elementary school, I was thought to be musically gifted—wrongly, I didn't have the necessary drive and focus, I was doomed to be a great listener—and my parents, who didn't know much of anything about classical music, started getting exposed to it, and my father fell gradually in love, especially with Beethoven (who was deaf and tormented like him) and eventually, after the VA fixed his hearing, Mozart. And later than that, I could make him an old-fashioned with Old Forester and he'd nurse it listening to a Mozart quartet, and that was pretty good.
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