{"id":298,"date":"2012-07-24T07:49:59","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T14:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calirose.com\/blog\/?p=298"},"modified":"2012-07-24T07:49:59","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T14:49:59","slug":"marvelous-midwest-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/marvelous-midwest-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Marvelous Midwest"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part 1 of 11 in the series, \u201cMarvelous Midwest,<\/a>\u201d about discovering my extended family in Indiana and \u201cukeing\u201d it up in Missouri. All in one very eventful trip\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

I grew up hearing stories about my great uncle Sidney. The musical prodigy. The violinist. The light of this Russian immigrant family that landed in Baltimore around the turn of the century. My grandmother was the eldest of five and twenty or so years later Sidney came along. The baby. It\u2019s wacky, but my mother and Sidney were born the same year and slid into a sometimes contentious brother-sister kind of thing. She was jealous of him because he got all the attention. Maybe too much attention<\/em> because when Sidney grew up, he vanished. It was like the earth swallowed him whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wonder what happened to Sidney?\u201d became my mother\u2019s lunch-a-bunch mantra. Year after year. Decade after decade. Lunch after lunch. Until four years ago when, over sushi and miso soup, my mother sounds the Sidney Refrain<\/em> one more time and I remember making a mental \u201cnote to self\u201d to Google his name as soon as I get home.<\/p>\n

And now I\u2019m staring into the computer screen at the picture of a beautiful woman who is holding a viola. Her name is Stephanie<\/a> and she is a member of the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra and according to her biography, the daughter of violinist and composer Sidney Tretick.<\/p>\n

Out-of-the-body experiences are interesting, aren\u2019t they\u2026<\/p>\n

Once I regain my center of gravity, I call her on the phone and we find doorways to the past that neither of us even knew existed. She tells me that Sidney moved to the Midwest, married a fellow violinist and they had five children. All professional musicians. Master classical players. They don\u2019t know anything about our branch of the family tree because their father so completely estranged himself from the on-going melodrama back in Baltimore. Sadly, Sidney died very young and left a widow with these five young children to raise. That kind of loss haunts us like a sad melody that plays through the background of our lives.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
My cousins Clifford, Blythe, Noelle, Drew and Stephanie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But the news–that there was a new cousin in California–spreads like wildfire and we soon \u201cfriend\u201d each other on Facebook and begin the process of \u201cgetting to know you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I meet\u00a0Drew Tretick<\/a>\u00a0first, at his gig where he plays violin at Downtown Disney in Anaheim. But Sidney\u2019s other daughters, Noelle and Blythe and his wife, Patricia, live in Indianapolis, Indiana. Not so close\u2026<\/p>\n

Then out of the blue, and I mean\u00a0out of the blue,<\/em>\u00a0I get an email from Janelle Hoffmann with\u00a0Boat Paddle Ukulele Company<\/a>\u00a0which is located in wine country Missouri, asking if I would be interested in teaching workshops and being the headliner at their next\u00a0Mighty Mo Ukulele Festival?<\/a><\/p>\n

Like\u2026Yeah!!!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Like yeah, especially after I mapquest<\/em> Missouri and discover it\u2019s a straight shot from Indianapolis to New Haven. A five hour drive. We can do that. We can do that!!!<\/em> And we do. My husband and I.<\/p>\n

You can only do \u201cfirst times\u201d once and this, my first trip to Indiana and Missouri, is a revelation. I find my kin. Both \u201cDNA\u201d kin and \u201cukulele\u201d kin.<\/p>\n

And have I got stories. So stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part 1 of 11 in the series, \u201cMarvelous Midwest,\u201d about discovering my extended family in Indiana and \u201cukeing\u201d it up in Missouri. All in one very eventful trip\u2026 I grew up hearing stories about my great uncle Sidney. The musical prodigy. The violinist. The light of this Russian immigrant family that landed in Baltimore around the turn of the century. My grandmother was the eldest of five and twenty or so years later Sidney came along. The … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogentry","category-midwest"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":2,"label":"blog entry"},{"value":37,"label":"midwest"}]},"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Cali Rose","author_link":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/author\/crbauthor\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":2,"name":"blog entry","slug":"blogentry","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":138,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":2,"category_count":138,"category_description":"","cat_name":"blog entry","category_nicename":"blogentry","category_parent":0},{"term_id":37,"name":"midwest","slug":"midwest","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":37,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":11,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":37,"category_count":11,"category_description":"","cat_name":"midwest","category_nicename":"midwest","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}