Piano

Things are going a lot better since I had a growth spurt last month and bought a piano. The effects of this bold purchase are both obvious and subtle:

Obvious: music.

Subtle: I keep checking my face for deep, craggy wrinkles since buying a piano is so adult-like.

Everyone has an idea of what it means to “arrive” in life. For some, it’s achieving a certain celebrity, social status, or bank balance. For me, it’s owning a piano.

The main thing to know is that it’s real. There are no electric cords or knobs, nor illuminated buttons labeled“Samba” or “French horn.” Hearing live music in the house, I feel as though I’ve passed a key test of parental character—maybe even competence.

Adulthood and piano ownership became entwined in my mind at a young age. When I was growing up, many of the families on my street owned pianos. At that time, kids tromped in and out of each other’s homes like a giant hotel party. Monopoly games, meat freezers, pianos—these 70’s standbys were regularly violated by a roving band of neighborhood marauders. In basements, we picked through frozen sides of beef in search of PushUps. In living rooms, our butts vied for space on shiny black benches so our hands could pound out “Heart and Soul” ten million times. Not once did a parent appear in a doorway to defend the Baldwin (and in one case, the Steinway).  That was the most grown-up thing of all. The pianos were beautiful to the eye and ear, and they were 100% accessible.

My house had the Monopoly game and freezer, but it lacked a piano. The absence of music in our lives was, I decided at age eight, making us tense. My sister and brothers agreed, and we made our case to our mother. The same mother who was putting herself through graduate school, working part-time, and single-parenting four children under the age of ten. “A piano?” she echoed, clutching the worn leather pocketbook suspended from her shoulder. Inside, sticks of DoubleMint were torn in half.

In an act of parental jujitsu that I now understand, my mother inaugurated “the piano jug.”  It was an antique, five-gallon vessel that stood twenty-inches high and sat just inside her bedroom door. The plan was that we’d all chuck our change into the jug until there was enough money to buy a piano.  From then on, (for about four days), every lucky penny my siblings and I found on the playground tumbled down the glass neck and into a dreamed rendition of “The Entertainer.”

“The bottom’s not even covered yet,” I’d moan to my sister and brothers. We’d stand around the jug in a circle, four young Frankensteins trying to conjure life from metal and hope.

It was my step-father, Will, who covered the bottom and then some when he and my mom married in 1978. Some people always have pockets full of change, and he’s one of them. He taught my siblings and me how to find a coin’s mint mark, and what the letters mean: B for New York, C for Philadelphia, D for Cleveland. These cities and more piled up in the piano jug every night, just before Will traded his trousers for the pair of PJs on his bedside chair.

As we grew older, the siren call of candy—and later, cigarettes—eroded the piano jug’s loot. A cork appeared in the bottle around 1982, emblazoned with the word “NO!” in my mother’s handwriting.  Over two decades later when my parents relocated to the Northeast, they tried to move the half-full piano jug. It broke from the weight of change.

In my semi-spooky way, I like to think that the Universe orchestrated the arrival of our piano last month to honor my mother’s birthday. I stumbled upon the instrument with my children at the Habitat Store while looking for building materials. We were in Doors and Windows, flipping flush slabs like Elton John LPs when we heard the notes of a piano, unexpected and true. We followed the sound to Furniture, and there it was, saying come on, baby, get your truck! Only professionals would do for this job, though. That I knew. “Where are we going to put it?” my daughter asked. “In the living room,” I said. “Right by the front door. Then we’ll learn how to play.”