Notes from Below Sea Level
My Mother’s Piano
[An Aria di Sorbetto]
Nestled among towering pine trees just off Hwy 28 in the town of Mount Tremper (a half hour or so from Woodstock, NY) is a farmhouse-turned-into-a-restaurant/bar/music venue called—oddly enough, after the owner’s last name—The Pines. Wednesday, my love took me there after dinner at a recommended Ramen House to enjoy some music. Apparently, on Wednesdays a few musicians are invited by the organizer (an amazing guitar player) to join him and jam for two hours. What followed can be described only as some of the best live music I’ve heard in the last couple decades. In a former living room, there are five musicians squeezed together in a roughly 6’ by 12’ “stage” area that also holds a respectable drum kit, all the sound equipment, and an upright piano, on which a magician of a man coaxed sounds too complex to follow, too seductive to ignore.
Later that night we sat on her porch, listened to music, and talked about musicians we’ve seen and those we would have wanted to see given the chance—an overall lovely evening whose only off note was my having slightly more beer and tequila than I should have; then again my mind is always at war with my aging body (daring it to be its youthful, devil-be-damned version I haven’t been able to support for at least two decades) as my embarrassing urge to impress my love results in a parched mouth, headache, and momentary regret over my extra-strong coffee in the morning and my inability to thoroughly enjoy the sunrise over the Catskills and the dazzling colors of fall that embrace me as a welcomed visitor.
On errant and varying mornings like this one, I wake with pain in the little finger of my left hand—it’s arthritis or nerve damage or something more sinister that results in a disfiguring twist. But it really doesn’t bother me much after some stretches and a cup of coffee. For some reason, though—call it the pain of original sin and the ritualistic attention it requires—this slight inconvenience reminds me of my mother’s piano. Like most things relating to my mother, it’s complicated, that piano. It appeared in our living room when I was about to turn seven years old. A big black upright, old but not decrepit; old enough to have been made without a sostenuto pedal, but it had keys of ivory and a solid sound board and (believe me, I know) weighed a ton. Nearly blocking the entrance through our seldom-used front door, it just appeared there one day on the only uninterrupted interior wall of our small living room.
The appearance of a musical instrument (besides the ukulele my father kept locked in his workshop) was a mystery in my family and one that unraveled over the years to reveal the multiple lies we tell ourselves and others to keep the peace and that semblance of normalcy we pray for at the end of each day. When asked, the answer back then was simple enough: my mother was taking a class (she was working on her masters for many years between children) that required her to have a piano at home to practice. So, my dad somehow acquired one. We weren’t allowed to touch the thing. It was my mother’s piano. The truth behind that beautiful piece of furniture, though, was so much more complicated.
My mother practiced often for the first few years; and, when she did, it was awful. It wasn’t a lack of aptitude, I believe, or even concentration—her approach to that instrument had nothing to do with mastering its sounds. On days when she was lost in herself, she’d pull me onto the bench so I could point out middle C and show her the movement for the grace note in Fur Elise. Though she would rarely let me strike a note, I could point out the keys to her as she struggled to read the music, push her toward the octave she should be in and remind her that some keys had two names. I could point and whisper which finger needed to strike (moving over or under) in preparation for the next note. I could coax her and laugh with her as long as I didn’t touch those keys. Despite our troubled relationship, there was a strictly-observed detente on that bench.
The consistent exception, though, over the course of those years was that soft, understanding grace note—a deft finger, elided on the edge of that stiff B-flat.
Truth be told, though, my mother never finished that master’s degree and never, I believe, intended to. She never really had a class the required an actual piano in a house devoid of musical instruments, record players, televisions, and radios. Beyond the basic human voice and the occasional dime-store transistor radio, music was somehow banished from the house as an almost unintended consequence of my father’s battles with his conscience: a wife suffering from manic depression and children that were brighter than he deserved or most likely wanted. Those days, in the Deep South particularly, psychotropic medications were barely understood, women were realizing the value of individual rights, the past was fading to sepia, and the fight against court-ordered desegregation was in full swing.
Although the 207 active school districts in South Louisiana were (and still are) distinct and independent from the State Board of Education, they had strikingly similar approaches to music education. Students in a school were screened for something or another and kids who made band (starting in the fifth grade) were placed in a single class (two if the student body was particularly large) so that schedules would match: hence band class and extra curricula activities were easily scheduled. Thing is—and this was so, no matter what school you attended back then—the band class was all-white and fairly evenly mixed between boys and girls. We all took the test, the whole school, every student. And wouldn’t you know it, when the list of those that “passed” the test came out every single person on there was white. Through those years, every single kid in my family “passed” and was accepted into the band class. None of us, however, was allowed to join band. By the time I was offered a place it was understood in my family that you didn’t bother bringing the paperwork home.
I wanted to. Badly. Hell, all of us did, I think. But my parents had consistently held that we couldn’t afford instruments, and no arguments or tantrums were brooked in that house. It struck me as sort of sad back then, just another thing I couldn’t do because we were poor. Like the appearance of that piano, though, it was more complicated. Against my mother’s wishes, my father insisted we not be put in segregated classes—even if that meant having to pass on “music” and, later on, “honors” classes. Though she didn’t win that battle, she did break him in that one small way: she got her piano. He brought one home for her as much to demonstrate a willingness to compromise as to tamp the constant, almost unbearable forte that layered my mother’s moods. To this day, I believe he compromised from the purist kind of love, no doubt, and perhaps a bit of exhaustion. The unspoken agreement, of course, was that this was a singular gift, a white flag of truce. She guarded that instrument as her own, a singular piece written and played for her alone.
As years played on and we all finished up middle school and junior high and high school and wandered off to find our own way, the piano was rarely used. It stayed in the house where I grew up and they both lived until their deaths, rarely ever mentioned and even more rarely played. The cousins and grandkids shied away from the old thing, cautioned by some unspoken survival instinct. No one was interested in having it tuned or repaired, and we eventually accepted it as a small reminder of my mother’s vanity and my father’s lack of understanding. When my mother passed some years ago now, there was no discussion or argument over the piano—it came to me by default. My siblings wanted nothing to do with that monstrosity that couldn’t hold a tune, had several broken hammers, and worn strings. Besides, most of them had pianos of their own by then.
I took it, though by then it was a worn metaphor even for me. Not so much a reminder of my parents but one of missed opportunities, unspoken struggles, and my own lack of imagination. It was more a weight on my heart than an instrument for filling silences with music. No matter, I took the piano. It was and still is my mother’s piano.
❧
Cheers everyone and here’s to a lovely Friday and a relaxing weekend. This morning is a travel day for me, flying back to Louisiana in the early afternoon. Sorry to be leaving the beautiful Northeast, but I do need to get back to work and pay some bills. Such is life, right?
