Facing the problem head on

The squeeze box is the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments. Street musicians, clowns, and old geezers at weddings have made it a bit of a laughing stock. All night bar parties and every drunken revel from Italy to Poland to France, and back, have featured it, loud and endlessly. Mostly loud. Once in Paris after a soccer game in the World Cup an Irish bar down the street from our hotel played accordion music ALL NIGHT LONG. Until in the early dawn someone yelled out the window: “Il est cinq heures dans la matin!” (It’s five o’clock in the morning!) Finally, blessed silence.

But I still love the accordion. Apparently, or I wouldn’t have written a novel about a Minnesota polka band. Polka mass! Accordions in church! It took a Duluth Catholic priest, Father Frank Perkovich, to invent Polka mass but it spread like wildfire. (What? You never heard of it? Come on.)

I revealed a mock-up of a possible cover for the novel here, and asked for comment. The Freeman Butts painting of the grain bins in the snow is so lovely. I wanted to use it. But in doing a final pass of the novel this week, I’ve decided I have to face this polka problem head on. There is a grain bin in the story but it’s really about the accordion — as a metaphor for life. The press and draw of family and the individual, the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a young man’s (and a young woman’s) life as they struggle to figure out who they are. How to love your family and still be yourself.

So I’ve decided to face this ‘polka problem’ head on by putting an accordion on the cover. Just an accordion, no player, just an object. I’m working on it as we speak, and you’ll see it very soon. So tell me, is polka a problem?