Our piano held a prominent place in our house when I was a kid, directly on the left when you entered the front door. It was not considered a piece of furniture or a piece of equipment, or some toy to be tinkered with, and thus held a respected and unique position. When one entered our house the sheen off our piano’s deep red wood tones were immediately apparent, evidence of its solidity and strength for the twenty-three years we lived there. It was still there, immovable, when I returned home from college for Easter and spring break to find that my parents had sold the house and moved without telling me.
“This is a fine welcome,” I said to myself, irritated. I was still fiddling with the locked front door when a smallish lady with her Pekinese dog answered the door and ask if she could help me.
“I’m sorry,” I said,” I thought I lived here, but the door was locked. Uh, I mean I used to live here with my family. Are my…parents here?”
“No, they are not. Are you Jeff?” She asked, as her dog looked at me sideways.
“Yes, I am,” I answered, stepping inside, eyeing the piano. “I thought I lived here, but…”
“No,” she interrupted, “your family moved recently, but your mom said to call them when you got in and they’d come pick you up. I see you’re looking at the piano. It’s a beauty isn’t it? It was too heavy to move, so your parents gave it to me. I don’t play of course, but I hear you do,” she added.
“Well, I used to,” I said, dialing my parents. “I haven’t played in years… Mom? Hello…this is Jeff, I’m home, at our house. Yes, the one we all used to live in. I’m standing right next to a lady in our house and our piano. She is the owner? Oh. I see. Ok. Ok. Can you come and pick me up?”
There was a long hesitation, as if she might be discussing the options with my father, but instead told me to sit down and practice the piano until she could come and get me. There was a click, then dial tone, and I stood there, in my own space, perplexed and speechless. In only a few minutes, I had been denied the entrance to my home, found out that my parents had moved without telling me, and who were now suggesting that I would not have a ride to my new home unless I sat down and practiced a piano that belonged to a lady I’d never seen before.
Normally, when I returned home from college on break, I was greeted with hugs and questions about college life, followed by more questions about my academic performance, followed by a continuous bombardment of home cooked meals. Now, I was home for Spring Break, home for the Easter holiday, a treasured holiday where our family dressed to the nines for the Easter service, listened enthusiastically to Handel’s Messiah at church, then return home to feast on rotisserie herb chicken, broccoli casserole and hot rolls made from scratch by my grandmother.
I stood in the foyer of my former home, those Easter memories wafting through my brain. I thought I could still smell Lemon Pledge everywhere and clean bed sheets and thought that my hard work at college qualified me for a week where I could sleep until noon and not have a care in the world. My only responsibility would be to hug my parents occasionally, say hello to my brother or sister if we happened to be in the same room, and get myself to the Easter service on Sunday where I would witness my father singing the final chorus to Handel’s Messiah breathtakingly off-tune and then hold the last note for a good forty five seconds, red-faced, until it looked like he might have a hemorrhagic embolism. This was the college break I was looking forward to – rest and rejuvenation. Easter, and all its power, was in the air.
I remembered all of this because I was standing in the foyer with my hand resting on that Bridgestone piano, the one my parents had now given outright to a lady that held her dog like it was an extension of her body. My hand however, was a real extension, and knowing its dutiful place, had some intrinsic muscle memory associated with this piano, of its history and from taking piano lessons every Friday continuously for ten agonizing years. Rain or shine, sick or dying, I was always there on the piano bench after school for my half hour lesson with my piano teacher, Miss Conduit, the same lady who played the coliseum size pipe organ at our church, a massive instrument so sensitive that a team of acoustical scientists had to be flown in to tune it every year from Beoluth University in Dusseldorf, Germany.
And as if this huge instrument was not enough for ushering in the Easter service, Miss Conduit would require my brother and I practice Handel’s Messiah, a simpler version of course, for several months leading up to Easter Sunday, when we each would be required to perform an agonizing rendition of it again, after the church service.
As God’s providence would have it one year, Miss Conduit, who always sat on the right of us, decided it was time for us to learn how to cross one hand over the other to play notes, a concept that seemed to us to have wonderful athletic appeal. Where piano lessons before had been more like a chore, we now had this fantastic new maneuver to make what we called the crossover, and could look forward to ending this years’ rerun of Handel’s Messiah at home with a dramatic toss of one arm over the other, almost like a forward lateral in football, followed by the drop of one finger, down , down, down like a lead weight and hit that final messianic note, right in front of Miss Conduit.
I thought life had really made a turn for the better when the crossover came along, but my brother was not impressed. It was going to take a lot more that a toss of one arm over the other for him to get excited about a piano lesson, so one day, snappish after practicing the same song for months and looking for other options, Gary opened the back panel of the piano to reveal a long row of hammers that made all the piano notes, and taped one of our plastic toy army men to the hammer of the last high C. At the moment of the glorious one-armed crossover, when one note would resound and carry with it all the weight and drama deserving of such an Easter finale, a dull and lifeless thuuuuud would be heard instead, which would have the effect of flattening the entire masterpiece and render it into a pitiful and miserable termination.
And so it happened that Good Friday, the final piano lesson before Easter, my brother sat down next to Miss Conduit, playing Handel’s Messiah with a flurry never seen before or since in our household, moving his fingers up and down the piano keys with holy athleticism. My brother built up his final crescendo, dramatically crossing his arm over to hit the final key, that High C above all C’s, which he hit confidently and hard, as if he really meant it. Instead of piercing the house with energy and verve, the note sounded like a man in an upstairs apartment who suddenly had fallen face down on his couch and died right there. It was all over rather quietly and abruptly with little significance whatsoever. The much-anticipated note, after the rise and fall of Gary’s arm, and two months of continuous practice, could not be attempted again. No. There was not going to be a second cross over, no going back with Handel’s Messiah, no do-over. The song was over, finished. And so it was too with the veritable life our piano.
It was three days later, when one of our pet mice escaped, and my father lifted up the piano’s back panel and discovered there a small green Army man taped to one of the hammer keys, ready to throw a hand grenade. At full stretch, the little soldier was only about two inches tall, but he had brought Easter to its knees in our house, and ended the respectable history of our piano, and caused the removal of any feelings that my parents had towards this beast of an instrument forming the bulwark of our home décor.
As I stood looking across the keys, having no home myself, I could still imagine my fingers moving along the keyboard and Miss Conduit next to me at the piano, correcting my poor posture. I wondered if the Army man was still in there hiding or had asked God for forgiveness for his inexcusable and unwarranted attack on our piano.
I came to my senses when the phone rang, and the new owner, this shrinking lady with the Pekinese dog handed me the receiver. It was my mother on the phone, saying that she was on her way to pick me up. I knew she’d ask me if I’d sat down at the piano and played anything – perhaps even a bit of Handel’s Messiah. I’d have to tell her no, of course, but that there was one note, a very high note I still remembered, one Easter, a long time ago.