In loving memory
I’m sitting in my living room, the sparseness somewhat jarring. An hour ago a truck rumbled off with our piano. Our closets are overflowing with other kinds of friends, books boxed suffocatingly “out of sight”, but the time finally came when we had to choose between them (and all the others scattered on every surface in the house), and this mammoth Lovely, who has languished in our living room virtually silent for over a year. I can’t play while Elijah is present (true, duets are possible, but E’s taste in sound is startlingly, jarringly different than my own), and I’m never here without him either in the room, or sleeping ten feet away.
So…not 48 hours ago I posted a picture on Craigslist, and within minutes had good as sold the thing. The buyer came hours later, paid for it, and arranged for movers to come the next day.
I’m shell-shocked, to be honest. I walked to the park when the buyer left, tearing up the whole way. What have I done? What have I done?
Al, the granddad there each day, was kind, and listened to my woe. We talked about instruments and music. He has a guittar he likes to play. I told him on my list of things to do before I die is learn to play the cello. But, mind you, I said, that diminishes nothing of my love for pianos.
I love pianos. To me they are like ancient trees; they soothe me, ground me. I started lessons at age 4, I think, and played my heart out daily until high school sports and a boyfriend took all my attention away. But I mean that part about my heart. Somehow, through all those years of practice, my heart got wound into all those strings. Maybe pressed into the pedals, the benches, the keys. And not just of only one piano. It’s all of them. The one that just got lugged down our steps walked with me through some very dark times. She gave and gave and gave when I had no words for what I was feeling–only notes.
I still have dreams of more composition, dreams of playing the blues, dreams of finishing the instrumentation for this song.
But…I have a toddler now, and I live in a paper-thin apartment, and even if there were no toddler involved, I would feel strange barging with music into all my neighbors’ homes uninvited.
So I’m sitting in my empty living room, imagining a wall full of books, trying to be happy that I get to see them all again.
As the truck drove off, and Elijah busied himself in the dust from where she stood, as I gazed nostalgically out the window and the smoke from the movers’ cigarettes wafted toward the sky, I thought, “Go well, dear friend. Go well.”
