Some of my very earliest memories happened underneath the piano. Our box of blocks was down there, and we played in the little cave below the soundboard, on the other side of the pedals. Sometimes we played while my mother practiced above our heads. It was loud. Mozart and Beethoven and Debussy were the soundtrack of our youngest years.
This piano has been part of our lives since before my siblings and I can remember. Our mother was a pianist from childhood, our father felt strongly that she should have a piano, they found one in a classified ad in the newspaper and they spent as much on the piano as six months of mortgage payments for the house they bought around that time. We all understood how special Mom's piano was.
We will always remember the house fire, 48 years ago, when our parents rescued the piano after our father cut the legs off with a chain saw so they could get it through the front door. For a day, the piano sat in the front yard, on its sawed-off legs, before it was moved to Harvey Helms' barn for safekeeping.
After the house was rebuilt, the piano returned (with legs that were a different color from the body), although I don't have a memory of where it was in the house because I went to college soon after. When my youngest sister had ballet recitals, my mother was pressed into service as an accompanist, and there was a flurry of practicing around those events.
The household gradually disbanded as the rest of my siblings went off to college and our parents split up. Charles, the most sentimental one of all, moved the dusty piano to the Moutoux Barn for his wedding ceremony ten years later.
Fast forward another 5 years or so, and there were now two young cousins taking piano lessons and other cousins playing string instruments. From time to time, my mother (Grandma) was recruited as an accompanist to the next generation.
By the time we moved to Blueberry Hill, our middle child was the most dedicated pianist in the bunch. My mother said that our daughter could inherit her piano, and this seemed like a good time to trade Mom's baby grand for the spinet we had. So Mom's piano moved into our living room.
When the pianist daughter was soon to leave for college, I realized there would be a very large and silent instrument taking up a serious amount of real estate in our crowded house. I needed to do something. I began to take piano lessons.
I don't know why I thought I would ever be like my mother or my daughter, but I will never get to their level. Never ever. It is possible I have some of their aptitude, but I do not practice nearly as much as either of them ever did. By now I have been taking piano lessons for 16 winters and I can read music, I can count, I am good with scales, I have some very rudimentary understanding of music theory, and I am probably as good as a fifth grader who doesn't practice much but who has a good ear.
But I have reached the place where practicing is fun. I want to practice whenever I get a chance, I love my lessons, and it is so satisfying to be learning something all the time. And the best part is that I have a duet partner and we always have a duet to work on. Somehow, even though I am mostly a winter pianist, I have managed to keep up well enough to play with my duet partner -- we are a perfect match.
Today we sat down together at her piano and we diligently used every practice method our wonderful teacher has tried to drill into us. We went backwards by measure, we blocked and bounced, we counted aloud, we did two measures at a time over and over, we breathed in unison. And after an hour, smoke was coming out of our ears and we had mastered some more sections of our duet.
My mother's piano will go to our middle child when she has a place that is big enough, and in the meantime, I will keep playing this precious instrument. I feel like I am keeping it warm until it gets back to a real pianist. And I don't care anymore that I will never play anything long and complicated. When I started my lessons back when I was 47 years old, I had three goals: to read music, to be able to sightread something, and to play musically. Those goals were so realistic, and I didn't even know that the real goal was to play duets. That is the best of all.
Playing duets with my mother is actually the very best of all, but I have to practice for about four months before I tell her I am ready for her to sit down with me. It takes her about 15 minutes to catch up to me. For a few years now, we have played a duet at the Blueberry Hill recital every June, and that is about as good as it gets.
