Piano Lessons

I touched a piano for the first time in ages - my old, decrepit upright Steinway – but it is mine, in a way that only an old, decrepit, but upright heart could know. It was purchased at a good price from my church, and to this day I believe the church organist covets it.

The pedals don’t work properly – it’s a bit too loud. But it’s tuned reasonably well. Once in an engineering lecture I was able to identify a single tone to within about six hertz. So I guess I have some measure of absolute pitch.

I almost never play the piano in a good mood. When I did, it was to imitate – to copy Tom Hulce in Amadeus, playing the piano upside-down, or to play a couple hymns, or try my hand at a new, interesting, not-too-complicated piece.

When I am in a bad mood, I don’t play set pieces. I improvise – or I continue a composition of sorts I started senior year in college, on the piano in the Platt Center. Like this Piano, I hardly ever touched it when I was happy.



As always, this piece started in, I think, F minor, very loud, very fast, very angry. But something happened after the first several familiar measures. It drifted into C Major. It slowed down.

And I found that I was using the notes to cry, to dream, to pray, to wish, but most of all, to feel. To feel the pain of the moment, the pain of yesterday, the pain of these last five years, and of the last twenty-six, now almost twenty-seven.

Drip, by drip. Whole notes, whole feelings.

I didn’t cry then. I’m not crying now. And I won’t cry later. In ten minutes of playing, and ten minutes of silence, I passed through all the stages of grief, and forgot.

I haven’t really, really spoken with a friend for a few weeks. But even if I did, I wouldn’t tell half as much as I told the piano, and it told me, today.