It’s a quieter day, here in Herstory land. My two OLDER sons are working with my husband (I hope he EXHAUSTS them). My youngest and I are going to go out for lunch and to buy him a minikeyboard because I sold the piano.
It’s a little bittersweet, this piano thing.
I didn’t want it to begin with, since my parents didn’t want to get me a keyboard (which I needed at the time) for Xmas WITH MY OWN MONEY, but instead, bought this dark brown upright piano that I don’t even know how to play very well.
Then, they kept it. Mom covered it in pictures and candles, some of which has caused slight damage to the wood.
When my husband and I finally moved into a house (we were married about 4 years), my mother told me, “Take this piece of shit to YOUR house.”
*bites her lower lip*
There’s a lot that I can say about that, but I’m going to just move on…
Anyway, we’ve had it here 12 years. NONE of my kids wanted formal lessons, but chose to instead bang on the keys and make horrifically dissonic noises that clashes… C and D for instance… although lovely in their own right, do not deserve to be played together UNLESS… you’re creating a musical for Tim Burton.
My youngest loves to play each key at a time for HOURS… then slam the cover down and run off to throw leggos around or strategically place matchbox cars so that MOMMY steps on them in the dark. I know he’s going to miss the piano, so seeing that I will not have to buy lunch for the teenage boys (who can eat an entire cow as a snack… EACH), he and I will have a day to ourselves.
But… we’re running late as I have been TRYING to figure out how to work around NOT having technology at the community college. If any of you, whom I know well, want to be ‘testers’ for my idea, let me know. I only need two of you.
Anyway… so at 5:30pmish today, a stranger is going to take my piano away forever and bring it to a family whose children want to learn piano, love music, and will hopefully take care of it.
Did I mention that the woman has never come to see it? She didn’t want me to play it for her, to see if the keys worked. She’s trusting me based solely on a few pictures I sent her and my word.
Yesterday, I sat at the piano, with a dust rag and rubbed each key until the dust and grime of 20 years was wiped away. Each piano key played a note that, albeit old and out of tune, will remain with me.
My extent of piano-playing is this…
I can read music. I can play bass and treble chords. I was able to play chords with my left hand and play the melody with my right. I was never able to fully play well. I took piano 1 and 2 in college, however, during P2, I wanted to try out for softball. I ended up breaking my right pinky in a freak kitchen-microwave incident during the 1987 World Series while the Mets were up at bat. I never finished the class because it made my hand throb. I finished the semester playing with one hand… ON the piano (dirty minds). After I dropped out of music college, I just monkeyed with the piano… here and there until it landed in my house and collected dust.
So, for a piano that I didn’t want… I sure feel sentimental about it. So much so that it even surprised me.
I have to let another family have it… seeing that we’re most-likely the 4th family to own it (it was made in 1935). And, in another 20 years, I hope the piano is well enough to travel to its next family… intact and well.
Posted by l'empress on July 28, 2008 at 11:43 am
That’s a sad piano story. So many people have wanted one and couldn’t have one — space or money constraints. My husband picked up an old electronic keyboard many years ago (it had buttons for the chords), and I used it to try to work out melodies for which I had no sheet music. We discovered that a couple of the kids did indeed have some kind of talent.
One of my daughters actually figured out how to play the chords on the keys. I didn’t know she had done so until the day I found her playing the melody with her left hand and the chords with her right. She also used to draw pictures with her left hand but always wrote with her right. (No wonder she had trouble telling her right shoe from her left!)
Posted by G on July 28, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I was able to write/play the melody for a Journey song (Open Arms) by just fiddling w/ the piano. I could write backwards by the time I was in 3rd grade and could write with both hands, mirror images. Does it make me smart? Nope, it just helped me to write notes that couldn’t be deciphered easily by teachers.