MOORHEAD -- A Moorhead man has just checked something meaningful off his bucket list -- and his Christmas list.
For years, Pete Sand's grandfather's fiddle had been sitting in a closet gathering dust. It was in disrepair and frankly there was nobody to play it.
And so, a Christmas surprise.
"What I was talking about with the scroll and the head," Pete Sand said, holding his late grandfather Arnie Lucht's old violin, which he played back in the day in the small north central North Dakota town of Newburg.
"Here, you can see on the neck of the violin, he played it quite a bit," Sand said of the violin.
"It would've been kind of nice to have been there and listened," Sand said, thinking back to when Arnie and his neighbors would gather in the barn together and make music.
At one point, Grandpa Arnie needed money and pawned the violin, Sand said, and the family would later buy it back. Years would pass.
"After Grandpa Arnie couldn't play anymore because his arthritis in his fingers got too bad, the violin was stuck in the closet at the farm," Sand said.
So, recently, he made a decision. "I drew mom's name for Christmas," Pete said.
That four-string violin from the early 1900s was not playable. It needed work after being closed up in a cabinet for more than 20 years.
Once repaired, Sand, who can't play the violin, asked Fargo musician Alex Rydell to play and professionally record "Danny Boy" and a few other songs at Steve Wallevand's River Wall Studio.
And then, Sand not only showed his mother, Joyce Sand, the restored violin. He had her listen to the audio of "Danny Boy," played on her late father's violin.
"It took me and my brother to explain that it was Grandpa's fiddle (her father) that was playing she heard and then a big smile and she got a little weepy," Pete said.
For Sand, it all came down to preserving a piece of the past -- family.
"Oh, these are the special things. Having that family connection back through time is so important," he said.