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By
Dan Barry
The New York Times
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It being
Wednesday, Hugh McDonald parked on the West Side and reached for
the large black case that contains his obsession. He tugged on the bill
of his baseball
cap and started walking east, toward Carnegie Hall.
You might guess his profession just by looking at his clothes: gray pants,blue
sweater, white shirt bearing the company name, and blue tie with the pattern
of small buses. Mr. McDonald is a bus driver, at least by day.
He is 54, unaSsuming and agreeable, the kind of man who says, “Yes,
uh-huh” a lot. But once he makes a decision, he can be as rigid as
a bu schedule. He now eats salad every day for lunch, because no way is
Hugh McDonald going to be another overweight bus driver.
He and his wife, Beverly, live with their four dogs in Berlin, N.J., not
far from Philadelphia. She runs a pet grooming business out of the house,
and he steers a 45-foot, 57- passenger commuter bus for Academy bus lines.
At 5:30 every weekday morning, he drives 30 miles to the bus depot in
Westampton, climbs aboard his assigned bus and drives 25 miles to East
Windsor, then Monroe, then Jamesburg, and finally to the park-and-ride
lot at Exit 8-A of the New Jersey Turnpike. Next stop, Manhattan. He lingers
a few hours, collects his passengers and returns to deep New Jersey, though
he does not reach his own home until 8 or 9 at night. His long bus drives
have no music to help pass the time, only a two-way radio offering dispatcher
chatter.
One afternoon about three years ago, while killing time until rush hour,
Mr. Mc-
Donald came upon a man playing Bach on a cello in the Times Square subway
station. The sweet song of this cello, the first one he had ever heard,
soared above the train rattle and jangle.
“The sound, the feeling, the intensity, the emotion of it,”
he recalled. “It was like a wave that came over me. I had never felt
that before.”
Suddenly, he wanted to play the cello. When he was a child in a Bronx
housing project, he had wanted to learn a musical instrument. But the
bleats of a trumpeter-in-training would have been too disruptive for the
neighbors, his parents had said, so that was that. Later, as a young man,
he often listened to classical music on a transistor radio m his bedroom,
occasionally recognizing some of the pieces as ones that he had heard
in church.
But this cello music.
For nearly a year that subway cellist’s music lingered in Mr. McDonald’s
mind — as he drove, as he ate his salad, as he drove some moreFinally,
his passion to learn overcame his fears of being too old. Between one
day’s rush hours, he went to the New York Public Library and picked
a school at random out of the telephone book:
The French-American Conservatory of Music at Carnegie Hall.
“They said, ‘We’ll teach you cello,’“he recalled.
“I said, ‘I can’t play a note, can’t read a note.’
They told me, ‘No problem.’”
Cellos cost several thousand dollars, so Mr. McDonald began renting one
for $49 a month, which was on top of the $45 he paid for his weekly hour
of instruction. But cost
did not matter, he said. “I wanted to play the notes the way I heard
them coming off that train.”
He spent nearly four months trying to get the sound of bow upon string
to evoke sounds that were pleasing to the ear. And when that moment came,
when the stroke of his bow summoned sweetness, he thought, wow, this is
Hugh McDonald making that sound.
Now, some 18 months later, he can coax recognizable music from the cello,
thanks to his commitment to practice. On most days, during his break between
rush hours, he parks in a Hoboken bus lot and heads with that black case
to the back of his empty bus. He has discovered that if he sets the cello
in the aisle, lays out his music on a seat and lifts a couple of arm rests,
he has just enough room to play.
On Wednesdays, though, he does not drive to Hoboken. He parks instead
on West 54th Street in Midtown. On one bus, standing room only takes a
new meaning and carries his obsession to Carnegie Hall for his weekly
session with Binna
Cvetkovic, cello instructor.
Ms. Cvetkovic, imbued with the patience of a natural teacher, continues
to drill the basics into Mr. McDonald. Keep the back nice and tall, the
legs spread apart, the feet flat. Keep the thumbs soft and the fingers
nice and round. Relax the right elbow. Keep the bow stroking the cello’s
powerful place — the highway. Now listen to the tempo.
Tap, tap, tap.
Last Wednesday, Mr. McDonald took his seat in Ms. Cvetkovic’s studio
and began to summon music from his rented cello. He played haltingly.
But the afternoon rush was hours away, and he had the time.
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