Trader

If dreams can be portents of what is to come, then I had my fair share of forewarning before my life was stolen away.

Each night, for the week preceding the event, I found myself returned to the workshop of my older mentor. Janossy was ten years dead, the workshop in the old outbuilding long gone, man and farm swallowed by the past, yet here he stood before me. Here was the sunlight spilling in through that splendid skylight high overhead, diffused and muted a hundred shades of green and yellow by the boughs of the maples overhanging the workshop. Here was the long pine workbench, covered with wood, shavings, tools and sawdust, the back of a guitar the only recognizable shape amidst the clutter.

I remember that guitar. Janossy never did finish it, but I did. He was working on it when he died, the top and sides, braces and bridge, a one-piece back. It was the perfect guitar body and deserved the perfect neck. I came close, but I couldn't match his workmanship, couldn't match the neck he would have given it. In the dreams, he's still working on it.

Sandor Janossy had been an enormous man with a temperament to match, embracing everything that touched his life with a huge enjoyment that was evenly matched in its intensity by the strong contemplative side of his nature. He had lived with the immediacy of a Zen master in an ever-present now, viewing the world through the artless eyes of a child, seeing, rather than looking. Which wasn't to say that he was simple -- or at least not in a pejorative sense. Instead he resisted complications, refused to be drawn into their snare.