Mandolin Found

I lost a mandolin once. It was new, it was badass, and I was using it to play music on a nightly basis with a few different bands and acts. It was made by Weber back when it was Weber himself building them.

I was playing a gig with my good friend and band mate in the Bay Area one night. It’s about a hundred miles from home. We played the show and loaded up my friend’s car to head home at last call about midnight. The mandolin went in the trunk on top of everything else and she shut the trunk lid.

I drove, she was tired and I usually drove anyway, so I did. We drove out, got on the freeway, and pointed toward Sacramento. When we were almost home we hit some bumpy freeway and the trunk lid popped up. Roberta said, “Oh shit, the trunk is open!”

I pulled off the side of the road and she went to check it out and I sat and fretted, and when she got back in I could feel her pain. It was palpable and I knew before she uttered a sound that the mando was gone. It was.

We were between exits so I drove to the next one and turned around to retrace our steps through Davis, hoping the trunk opening was recent. I got turned around and we drove the last five miles again re-tracing our path. We drove as slow as we could with bright lights on looking for a mando case or mando debris. and never saw anything resembling my little jewel.

Roberta asked if I wanted to re-trace all the way back the ninety-something miles. All I could think was even if we found it it would be a spot on the highway of toothpicks and wires, so I declined. We drove home and cried and cried. Roberta, of course, decided she would somehow pay for a new one. It was an expensive mando and would not be easy to replace.

I decided I would take a little bit of a break from mando playing. Losing one is heart-wrenching and my desire to not have to deal with losing one again outweighed my desire to play music, so I borrowed a mando from a friend to finish up the few gigs I had left.

I called the highway patrol, I called Bay Area cops and posted pics and stories in the Bay Area classifieds and Craig’s List, and called all the music shops and alerted all I could think of to keep an eye out for it, but I was certain I would never see that mando again.

I was rehearsing the next evening with another band, playing my borrowed mando and my phone rang. I answered it and it was a friend bartender at the Fox and Goose, a Sacramento mainstay venue where I played frequently. When I answered he told me that a man had called him and said he found a small musical instrument and in the case was a picture of a white-haired man standing in front of the pub’s sign.

As he was telling me the story I was thinking how random that someone would have found my mandolin and called the Fox and Goose. When he told me about the picture I remembered I had been given a photo of me out in front of the Fox and Goose and for lack of anywhere else to put it, I put it in my mando case. “What a story” was what I was thinking.

He gave me the guy’s phone number and his name, Mike, and I called him immediately and when he answered he told me his story.

Mike worked on a road construction crew and he told me he was working on the freeway in Hayward at night. As he was telling me I remembered we had gotten on the freeway in Hayward and had negotiated through a bunch of cones and reduced lanes of a construction zone shortly after we got on the freeway. There hadn’t been much traffic and we were going freeway speed. He said he saw something out on the lanes and though he didn’t know what it was he thought it might cause an accident so he ran out and retrieved it.

He said, “I opened the case and knew right off someone would be missing this little jewel.” He said he didn’t know what it was but it looked like it was unharmed, though the case was pretty scraped up. And he told me, ” I saw a picture of some gray haired guy standing in front of the Fox and Goose so I started calling different informations to get a number.”

He called all around the Bay Area and couldn’t find a listing for the place. And finally asked for statewide information and they found the number.

The whole thing sounded surreal. It was flying through my mind that this was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime story. What’s the chance that a mandolin would fall out of my friend’s car at exactly the place where some guy was working on the road under the glaring floodlights they use and he would actually run out on the road to rescue it and then go through all those steps to track me down?

We made an appointment for me to drive to his house the next day to pick it up. I have never felt so elated. It was an even better feeling than when I went to buy the mandolin a few short months before. I hardly slept that night.

Mike lived about eighty miles from me so I had time to think about the whole story. My mind was going through all the various steps that had occurred to get my mandolin back to me. I sang songs, I smiled and cried, and drove all the way to his home.

Mike’s wife opened the door when I got there and invited me in. She knew my name already and the story and told me Mike was in the shower and would be right out. I followed her into the kitchen and I saw my mandolin case on the table. She asked me if I wanted coffee I think, but my mind was going through some serious changes. I really only remember opening the case which sported some serious road rash on every side and every corner and seeing my Weber, still shiny, laying inside in its velvet bed.

Mike came out and when I shook his hand I had tears just streaming down my cheeks. I was blubbering and I was trying to hand Mike the hundred dollar bill I had in my hand. He refused to take it.

He said, “You’re saving me a bunch of money, I thought I was going to have to pay for lessons to learn how to play that thing, I didn’t even know what it was.” I blubbered some more and he said, “What would be great, though, is if you might play Happy Birthday for my son. Today’s his birthday. He’s four.”

His boy was standing there watching the whole thing as I pulled the mando out to see if it was good on it’s back. It didn’t have a scratch I could see, but I reserved judgment because I couldn’t see clearly through all the tears. I blubbered through a total mess of Happy Birthday for the little guy.

Mike still would not take my money. He was getting ready for work so he bid me and my little jewel goodbye. Mike’s wife walked me to the door. I told her to buy her son something special from me for his birthday and left the hundred dollar bill on the little table by the front door as I said goodbye.

Mike is a normal everyday guy, he probably gets mad, bumps his elbows, and has little dribs and drabs of extreme bliss as he winds through his life, but in the end, his ticket is punched as one of the very good ones.

I still play that mando. It’s not new and shiny anymore. It’s on its third set of frets, the finish is worn through where my hand rests on it and has scratches pretty much everywhere. The sound it makes may be the sweetest anywhere. It is truly blessed and I am honored to play it. The case? I never replaced it. I love it almost as much as I love the mando. I have, however, had to resort to putting band stickers all over it to hold down the peeling cover.