Books/Harpsichord/Harpsichord.txt

Foreword
Chapter
I was 16, driving home from a piano lesson. I turned the corner into our cul-de-sac.
Wait, why are there police and paramedics parked in front of our house?
I go to the front door. “I live here. What’s going on?”
“Looks like your little brother just offed himself with a rifle.”

After that, my recollection is chaotic.
I remember my mother coming to a screeching halt, leaving the car door open and the engine running as she ran into the house.
I remember police, and paramedics, and the coroner, and detectives taking photos.
I remember the gurney as they wheeled him out.

And then they all left, and there we were: my step-father Tony, my mother, and my other brother.

So Tony and I decided that we needed to clean up ‘the mess’ on the floor and wall in the master bedroom. It had to be done.
So we got buckets, and sponges, and got to work.
While my mother sobbed uncontrollably in the living room, with feral shrieking that sounded more animal than human.

Eric was 13 years old.




He didn’t stand a chance.

Dad was a lieutenant in the Navy, and the Navy doctors decided it had to be nine months.
Oops, off by a month.
In that last month is when your glands and lungs get polished off.
Consequently, every winter — like clockwork — Eric spent a week in the hospital in an oxygen tent.
Also, because his pituitary wasn’t working right, he was almost a foot shorter than his classmates — regularly ridiculed and picked on.
And then he was off the charts smart. Back then I.Q. tests were a big thing, taken very seriously. At the elementary school he attended, where he took the test, he scored higher than anyone ever. I don’t know what the score was, but it was so high that they had him take the test again, this time under the watchful eye of a proctor. Same result.
But he was terribly withdrawn. Terribly. He had no use for school, or playing outside, or anything, really.. All he wanted to do was sit in his darkened room and play with his hand puppets.
I’ve wondered if he wasn’t autistic. In a day when ‘autism’ wasn’t even a word in psychiatry yet.
Meanwhile, my step-father Tony was the hard-driving executive — a Vice President at RCA (a really huge international electronics company). He also had a serious alcohol problem. And he could get physically brutal. 
Tony just couldn’t understand why Eric wasn’t “living up to his potential.” He’d bellow at him. He’d ground him. Suspend TV privileges. Berate him up and down — no change.
Meanwhile, his pediatrician thought that some new drug might jump start his pituitary. No effect, so he discontinued it. “He might be ‘kinda blue for a little while’ he told my mother.”
Then, in January 1970, Eric spent his annual week in an oxygen tent. First day back in school a history test awaited him — for which he had missed all the material. He had to take the test anyway.
So, coming home with a D on his history test, knowing the reaming he’d get from Tony, he got the rifle down from the top shelf in my parents bedroom. And they didn’t keep it loaded, so he got down the ammunition too. And then, he was so short that he couldn’t reach the trigger, so he took off a shoe and sock and used his big toe.


I was in utter misery. As his older brother, I kept racking my brain if there was “something I could have done.”
Meanwhile, my folks took my other brother to a psychiatrist, who immediately put him on anti-depressants. Back in 1970, those were really crude — I took one look at my brother’s almost drooling affect and said to myself. “We’re not doing that.”
Instead, when the darkness descended, I’d sit and play Bach — sometimes for hours, sometimes the same piece over and over, until it passed. 
I never, however, ever remotely considered following Eric’s path. I knew this would pass — somehow. I just had to find the way.

Meanwhile, friends at high school attended a local Evangelical church. I had alreay been going with them.
After Eric, however, my search for ‘answers’ took on real urgency. I went to every service and Bible study I could. But I didn’t find their answers very satisfactory.
So I kept pressing.
Finally, one day, Pastor Bob said, “You know, if you learned Greek, you could read the New Testament for yourself in the original and answer your own questions.”
I! CAN! DO! THAT!
I didn’t act on it right away — Life was still too crazy for that.
And everyone had their hearts set on me going to music school — Cal Arts in particular.
So I went there for a year, in abject misery.
So at the end of that year, I looked around for the toughest Greek program I could find in the greater Los Angeles, and transferred to Biola University (originally “Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

Biola was awesome! I loved it there!
To be sure they had their quirks: you had to go to chapel every day (and submit your punchcard so they could verify it.) And you had to take one Bible class every semester. Whatever.
But their Greek exceeded my expectations. They were ruthless about it. 

First day: “Know chapter 1 for tomorrow, there will be a test.”
Second day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 2 for tomorrow.”
Third day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 3 for tomorrow.”

94% was an A, 88% was a B, 80% was a C — half point off for wrong or missing accent mark.

In the first semester they had two sections, 25 students each. By the end of week two, class size was cut in half. By the 4th semester, there was one session of 8 of us left.

I made vocabulary cards that I hung around my neck — we all did. Noses buried in our grammars every spare moment. On campus we were known as the “Greek Freaks.”

After that first year, they offered both semesters of second year in an 8 week summer session. Lecture for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. The first day of class the instructor said, “Don’t even try to have a life outside of this class. No job. No nothing.” He was right.

Thus I was able to cover 2 years of Greek in a calendar year. With near perfect scores. (Missed a few accents marks.)

There were two other courses that I took that made a huge difference.
One was “Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament.” The idea is that the Greek New Testament didn’t come down to us in nice leather bound volumes. It came down to us mostly in pieces — some fairly complete, much of it fragmentary. Half of Mark here. A few pages of I Corinthians there. And they aren’t all identical in their wording. Most of the time it’s pretty minor — different spellings of proper names, for example. But sometimes the differences are significant. 
At the time, the prevailing practice was “whichever version is oldest, use that.” Dr. Sturz — the Textual Criticism professor, disagreed with this, and was able to prove that this approach is too simplistic. 
He was fond of saying “A million Frenchmen can be wrong.” Meaning that just because ‘everyone’ thinks things are a certain way, doesn’t mean they are.

The other was a Survey of Philosophy. It was broken up into four semesters, and it worked out I was able to take two of them: Graeco-Roman philosophy, and “Modern Philosophy — Descartes through Kant.” 
Dr. Hansen was first rate. In his class you didn’t have to agree with anything — but you had better be able to articulate why not. 
In due time he had me over to dinner with his family, and he became just ‘Del.’ Dinner on Sunday became regular. They had a nice grand piano, so I made a point of “playing for my supper,” which they really enjoyed. His office was down in the basement: bookcase after bookcase packed with books on philosophy, history, etc. A couple times I grabbed a book at random, “Hey Del, what’s this one about?” And he’d launch into a detailed summary that made my eyes glaze over.
He also had a well-equipped shop in his garage — both woodworking and metal working (including welding). More than once I’d bring my beater car over, and we’d fix it together.