I parted ways with a good friend of mine yesterday. She’s been there since before I can remember. She’s been subject to my joys and my tears and my anger. I’d say she’s never reacted back, but the years haven’t been good to her, and in turn her age has made her a bit temperamental.
She’s seen me through childhood, during the time I hoped we’d become friends up until the moment we first connected. She entered awkward adolescence with me. And she even hung back while others took her place for some time.
She’s been the life of the party and the forgotten friend in the shadows.
And before you fear that I’ve lost a living flesh friend, I’ll ease your worry. Though my loss may not be human, she may not have a brain or a heart or a soul, she has been responsible for developing each of these parts within me.
Somewhere during the 60s, my grandmother bought a piano. She didn’t buy it for its sound or to learn to play herself, but simply because at that time, owning a piano was a statement piece. She liked the look of it. At the time, the spinet was popular, but any pianist will tell you what a quick google search also will—it’s the bottom of the barrel where pianos come. It is the smallest upright piano you can purchase, and is built completely different from the rest of the upright family making it more and more difficult to tune as it ages.
But I knew none of this when first I met my piano. All I knew was that Gram thought it was the loveliest piece and that when she bought it, it came with free lessons—which my Pop took, and then my mother followed in ‘wanting’ to learn.
She might not have known anything musical, but had Gram not decided she needed to have a piano in her home, I might possess no musical ability today.
The piano came to live at my parents’ home soon after they moved in over thirty-five years ago. My brother, Justin, two years older than me, was first taught piano by my mom. Eager to do anything Justin was doing; I’d sneak over to the piano to make my own music. I would beg my mom for lessons, only to be told I needed to wait. I would start to learn when I was Justin’s age.
Once I started, I could not be stopped. The piano sat in my father’s office and all day long I would play.
When I was in elementary school, Pop and Gram would be at our house everyday working as my dad’s personal assistants taking phone calls for his plumbing company. After school, I would rush to the piano, playing quickly through my lesson material and then onto the fun stuff, reserving Hungarian Rhapsody for somewhere near the end. Pop—whose parents both were Hungarian—would sit in my father’s desk chair six feet behind me and clap along and I would never finish the song in one turn. I would repeat it again and again, just to keep it from ending. Just to give him a little more time with the music.
The piano came to live with me when I was married. It has taught hundreds of little fingers. It has been gathered around for Christmas caroling and for solos by Jonathan. It has been a place I’ve gone to clear my mind, and a place I’ve gone to work out my sadness.
I knew from the day we brought her here that she had problems. Even when she was at my parents’ house, the tuner told us she could only tune to a half step below standard pitch. In recent years, one of the black keys would disconnect, the hammer unable to hit the string, and I would need to go into the depths of the piano to reconnect it. The last time she was tuned, one of my higher keys broke a string, causing the sound to be even lighter than usual.
Note the ‘screw’ which is further out from the rest
There wasn’t much worth being done to save her, and I knew the inevitable was soon approaching. Now that the time is here, I’m finding my heart aching in an unusual way. Perhaps it is all the history locked into this one little piano. Perhaps it is the longing to have played even more. Perhaps it is simply that saying goodbye means change, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it.
Whichever it is, I’m going to miss her. There is something indescribable about the life that a real piano brings. It is something that no electric piano, no matter the grandness of it, can create. She filled the room with her presence and it leaked out to the streets. My first year living in this home, our neighbor across the street asked if we had a piano CD playing, that’s the sound she was capable of spreading.
I know it’s just a piano. And a lot of people will only see it this way, so I don’t fault them. But she was so much more than just a piano to me. She was a teacher, a disciplinarian, an artist, a confidant, a go between, a therapist, a lifeline, a voice, a friend.
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