Following one's own tune

Dilg (rhymes with bilge) blew in and out of town this week, arriving from Montana and departing today for St. Croix. I am recovering from the experience.

Ron Dilg and I began our commiserative acquaintanceship many years ago, when he worked with self-tortured reluctance as an artist in the newspaper's promotion department, whose corporate atmosphere appealed to his passion for liberty the way I imagine a child's jar delights a firefly trapped inside it.

In those years, I served as coffee-machine confessor, hearing his daily agonies and even understanding them, probably because the minor stockholders of my brain had campaigned at every annual meditation to wrest me from my respectable responsibilities and drop me at a hidden studio-loft, there to restart life without health insurance coverage or a retirement plan. I never acquiesced.

To assuage my temptations and still keep my collars buttoned-down and my children in electronic toys, I visited with a liturgical regularity local jazz clubs, acoustical bistros and artists' hideouts, always keeping in loose touch with the itinerant talents whose sole concession to my world was to keep in their possession one necktie and a sport jacket, for funerals. Over the years, I have offered respect and great affection to a circle of societal outsiders that has included musicians of every stripe (some giants of jazz), a former priest, horse-trading marine mechanics, minor criminals, clam poachers, an old printmaker who probably is dead, a leather-crafter who despite notices might not be, and Dilg.

A sketch artist, a watercolorist, lately a sculptor in bronze, and a guitar-mandolin-accordion-playing, bluegrass singer, Dilg tried to influence the voting in my head and periodically sent me symbolic messages, like a 60-million-year-old, fossilized, hard-shell clam he found in a Montana valley that evidently once hosted ocean life, and hand-captioned sketches from St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, where he spent last winter playing music, designing a villa for an architect, of all people, and marveling at a tide that never rose or fell, because of its location in the middle of the gravitational bathtub.

He gets me every time with stories. Sunday night I took notes on a napkin at a place called Someplace Else in Farmingdale; Tuesday night, at Tupelo Honey in Sea Cliff. The notes I can read tell how Dilg and his sons, Casey, then 19, and Jamie, then 8, were driving from Jackson, Wyo., to Cook City, Mont., last summer for a bluegrass gig at the Miner's Saloon, when Jamie began to suffer what his father called a "Cookie Monster Attack." Dilg pulled the arthritic old Subaru off to the "shoulder" of a dirt road. He got out, rummaged through the duct-taped-constructed luggage for a package of cookies and soothed the growling stomach of his boy.

When he arrived at the venue, Dilg discovered that his 1957 Gibson F-5 mandolin was not in the back of the car, where it was supposed to be. Responding to Dilg's initial spasms of indignation and horror, the good citizens of Cook City lit out en masse in search of the purloined mandolin and the presumed thief, while Dilg telephoned (Dobro) Dick Diloff, a colleague minstrel who had not yet left their home camp in Livingston. Diloff brought the "other" mandolin, a 1917 Gibson F-2 model. As the evening wore on, and Dilg began to replay the events of the day on the road, he realized that the F-5 mandolin might have jumped out of the back of the Subaru and set itself down on the side of the dirt road, to better allow Dilg to rummage for cookies. Dilg locked onto the memory of the spot in the valley where he had stopped but declined the opportunity to call off any Cook City citizens' search. He was not going to reveal that he might have just left the $3,000 instrument along the vast roadside of the American West.

He drove back to the valley site two days later. The Gibson was gone. "Hard moment," he said. "It was like, `You blew it, pal. Bye-bye.' I was to the point where I could go into an emotional conundrum about it or just let her go. I remembered an old cowboy who had found his wife with another man. He shook his head and looked at me and said, `I'm sending her down the road like an old cow, Ron.' So, I'd just lost my beautiful mandolin. Down the road, like an old cow. Let's move on."

Six months later, Dilg was visiting Dobro Dick in Livingston, when his brother, Peter Dilg, called from Baldwin. "Ronnie," Peter said, "are you missing something?"

A woman from Illinois had found the thing and eventually brought it to a National Park Ranger who had rifled through the notes in the case and found the address of Peter's business, The Baldwin Antiques Centre. "I knew instantly what he was talking about," said Ron, brandishing the instrument. "This old cow had a nose of its own; got back here through one of those great connective tissues that you find in life. I have since visited the park ranger, and I'm sending a cassette tape to the Illinois lady, so she can hear what this thing sounds like."