The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto Read Online Free PDF

could wrap your world in chains. Disapproving parents, dismissive record executives, vindictive critics.
    Sometimes I think the greatest talent of all is perseverance.
    But only sometimes.
    For while Baffa argued with the music school owner, young Frankie gave me a special moment. He wandered into the back room, where the instruments were stored. There his eyes widened at a treasure trove heretofore unseen in his young life: a spinet piano, an old viola, a tuba, a clarinet, a snare drum—and a guitar. The guitar was lying on the floor. He walked over and sat down next to it. It had a simple wooden body with a red and blue rosette around the sound hole. Most children would have grabbed its neck, plunked its strings, twisted its tuning pegs as if they were toys. But Frankie just stared at it. He studied its shape. He cocked his head as if waiting for it to talk. I found the respect he showed most satisfying. And, given what he had just endured with that long-chinned naysayer, I felt the moment was right for a little magic. Now and then, we talents can surge inside you to create the inexplicable (well, inexplicable to you). You call these “flashes of genius.” We call it stretching.
    Frankie reached out and pressed a finger on the third string, just behind a fret. He quickly released it. A soft note rang out. He smiled and did it again, the next fret up, using what guitar players call the “hammer-on” technique—a hard and quick push and release. Another note. Then another. He quickly figured out the relative sounds made by pushing behind each fret. Simply put, he was teaching himself a scale.
    So I gave him another nudge.
    Soon he was sounding out a melody. His eyes widened with each new note, because playing a song for the very first time is my greatest revelation, like discovering you can walk on a rainbow. He began to hum along. Had the two grown men in the front room stopped their arguing, even for a moment, they might have heard the little miracle of Francisco de Asís Pascual Presto, not yet five years old, fingertipping his way through a tune he’d heard many times on a Saturday-morning radio program, a nursery rhyme turned jazz standard:
A-tisket, a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way, I dropped it
    It was Frankie’s first guitar performance.
    And no one heard it but me.
    Down the hall, Baffa lost his patience with the owner. He yelled, “Francisco! We are leaving!” The child stood up and gave a farewell pat to the guitar, realizing he had found what he was looking for, and he was no longer rubbing his eyes.

    This still left him shy of a teacher. Clearly the music school was out, and it was the only one in Villareal. Baffa felt defeated. On the way home, he stopped and bought a bag of oranges. He peeled one for the child and gave a piece to the hairless dog, who chomped it loudly. They walked together, Frankie’s second band, a trio with eight legs.
    “That man was an idiot,” Baffa mumbled.
    The hairless dog barked in agreement.
    “Idiot,” Frankie repeated.
    Baffa laughed and rubbed Frankie’s hair. That made Frankie happy, even if he didn’t know what “idiot” meant. They walked home with Frankie humming “A-Tisket A-Tasket” and the hairless dog singing silently along with him.

    That night, Baffa returned to the taberna where he had once seen the blind guitarist play. The bartender remembered him as well, but said the man had been fired several years ago. Too much drinking. Too many late arrivals. He believed he was staying in a flat above a laundry on Crista Senegal Street—if he wasn’t already dead.
    “Dead?” Baffa said.
    The bartender shrugged. “He drank like a man who wanted to get this life over with.”
    The next day was Sunday. After attending morning mass, Baffa took the boy and the hairless dog to Crista Senegal Street, hoping to catch the guitar player in a good mood. Even a drunk, Baffa reasoned, might give Sunday to God.
    He found