the piano
it wasn't my fault. I was a helpless bystander. when we were little and lived in the blue-grey house, we didn't know the world was spiraling in on us, and whatever structure our parents had contrived was about to collapse. we only knew the gloom and tension in the house, and escaped it into the yard, into the mango trees, and sometimes outside the wall into what seemed like a playground that lay between our house and the river. (our playground was the ruins of a warehouse that had stood at the edge of the river, and been torn down when the suburbs swarmed out to surround it.) but one day when we couldn't get out - I suppose it was raining fit to kill or something - I heard the piano playing and I heard my mother's voice in the kitchen. a ghost? a visitor? I went to investigate. oh my goodness! my little sister sat on the piano stool and played a hymn. oh my goodness! she played it with all the body English that my mother used. you see, sometimes when running the house and minding the kids and whatever else was going on in her life mounted up into Too Much To Bear, my mother would escape into the Room with a Piano. it was her room. we were definitely not supposed to be in there. I had snuck in there several times, of course, but when I depressed one or another of the keys, the piano responded with a plinkety sound that had nothing to do with music. I can still do that. my little sister must have seen, heard, felt something other than I had. she had twisted the piano stool up high enough that she could sit on it and reach the keys. with her tiny little hands, she had figured out how to play more than one key at a time, and what to do with her left hand while the right hand played the melody. honest to god! she was playing a hymn and leaning into the piano, leaning right or leaning left, or leaning away from the piano, just like mother did when the piano rescued her from the mundane. oh my goodness! I knew trouble when I saw it. before I could warn my little sister though, my mother stormed out of the kitchen, saw me standing lookout, and the hurricane began. I was ordered to stand still right there. the ruckus alerted my sister and she tried to jump off the piano stool. piano stools are treacherous devices. hers fell toward my mother while my little sister fell the other way, and a miracle happened. my mother caught them both before either hit the floor. well, she had to catch my little sister. she was gonna yell at her! you can't yell at someone who's already got a broken head! and she had to catch that stool. I don't know what all she had to do to get that piano, but no part of it was gonna get damaged! anyway she caught them both and lost her storm in the process. but not entirely. she pronounced our dooms. we were going to Learn Music! dear god! she hired some woman with great credentials, who probably was a lovely woman to some people, but not to miscreant students. my knuckles still hurt when I think of her. one thing you should know about me, at least for this story. I have no music. I have studied music on the piano, on a trombone, on a guitar twice. I can make noise on all those instruments. but my little fingers once learned scales and chords and chord progressions, without ever learning music. my little sister and I were forced to take piano lessons in Brasil, and in Clovis, New Mexico, but not in Albuquerque. thank you, Albuquerque. and my little sister who taught herself how to play a hymn just watching my mother play learned to hate the piano and scales and chord progressions - or that's what I remember. I appreciate the piano all right, but I do not love it. thank goodness I can still appreciate someone else playing it, like in a jazz band, or a country-western band, or even onstage at a classical concert. I love their music even if my knuckles do hurt.
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