Keeping hands on wheel8212;and on bow and strings

He is 54, unassuming and agreeable, the kind of man who says, 8216;8216;Yes, uh-huh8217;8217; a lot. But once he makes a decision, he can be as rigid as a bus 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, NJ, 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, McDonald 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.

8216;8216;The sound, the feeling, the intensity, the emotion of it,8217;8217; he recalled. 8216;8216;It was like a wave that came over me. I had never felt that before.8217;8217;

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 neighbours, his parents had said, so that was that. Later, as a young man, he often listened to classical music on a transistor radio in his bedroom, occasionally recognising some of the pieces as ones that he had heard in church.

But this was cello music.

For nearly a year that subway cellist8217;s music lingered in McDonald8217;s mind 8212; as he drove, as he ate his salad, as he drove some more. Finally, his passion to learn overcame his fears of being too old. Between one day8217;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.

8216;8216;They said, 8216;We8217;ll teach you cello8217;,8217;8217; he recalled. 8216;8216;I said, 8216;I can8217;t play a note, can8217;t read a note.8217; They told me, 8216;No problem8217;.8217;8217;

Cellos cost several thousand dollars, so 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. 8216;8216;I wanted to play the notes the way I heard them coming off that train.8217;8217;

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.

8216;8216;It was like, 8216;Oh, I8217;ve reached it8217;,8217;8217; he recalled. 8216;8216;At least I can make it sound good.8217;8217;

Now, some 18 months later, he can coax recognisable 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 Manhattan and carries his obsession to Carnegie Hall for his weekly session with Biana Cvetkovic, cello instructor.

Cvetkovic, imbued with the patience of a natural teacher, continues to drill the basics into 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 cello8217;s powerful place 8212; the highway.

Now listen to the tempo. Tap, tap, tap.

Last Wednesday, McDonald took his seat in Cvetkovic8217;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.

8212; New York Times