My mother was born in 1923, at a time when entertainment was still home-based and people-generated. No TV, a bit of radio, and longer time to travel between places....and she had musical talent. She began playing the piano as a small child, sang in choir and choruses through her school years and even acted in local plays. By age seventeen, she was playing jazz piano with fellow musicians, and jazz was still all the rage.
It was no surprise, then, to those that knew her that one of her first "credit" purchases as a newly-divorced young working woman (she married her high school sweetheart at the start of WWII, but the marriage only lasted a few years, partly because of the emotional pressures on him as a war pilot) was her very own, upright piano. She bought it from Brueners, a local furniture store, on the installment plan, while working as a secretary for former California governer Edmund Brown (Jerry's father). It was her pride and joy in her tiny apartment, and she made sure it was carefully moved when she married my dad in 1953, and they bought a newly constructed home in which to raise a family.
She didn't play all that much when we were children; I don't think my dad had the same sense of musical appreciation. But, there were times, often in the late afternoon when children are tired and cranky and waiting for the transitions that come with dusk and mealtime, when she would sit down and regale us with our own private caberet show. I didn't know it at the time, but she was really a fantastic jazz pianist, having had classical training but also learning to play by chord, and able to accompany people familiar with their instruments but unable to read music.
These sessions were like magic to us, or maybe more like ice cream. Special treats, in that they were infrequent, and lively. We would dance around, but still the music would have the desired effect of "soothing the savage soul" of four young children.
Mom thought that learning music was essential, especially for girls. Therefore, her dutiful eldest daughter was started on piano lessons at age five, the same time I learned to knit. I plodded along, out of a desire to please probably more than anything else, but it served me well in learning math all through school (email me if you want to discuss the connection between music and math learning; its too complex to go into with this post), and I have never forgotten how to read music. Actually, music became my first second language, and probably I absorbed it better than the Spanish I studied several years later.
My brother who was 17 months younger also took piano lessons for awhile; I always thought that it was a sexual bias on my parents' part to let him off the hook while I kept on taking music lessons all through elementary... In reality, my mother was hoping I would inherit some of her talents and go farther with them than life had allowed her to, but instead it was that brother who eventually became a drummer, played in a multitude of rock bands and even toured regularly through his twenties... none of them got famous, though I do recall that on one tour they fronted for Tesla.
Mom was very excited when DD Nikki exhibited an interest in music. Nikki had a Casio keyboard as a child and took piano lessons from a dear, old friend in Downieville when she was in early elementary. This indication of musical interesnt was enough to convince Mom to give her piano to Nikki when she was about eight, essentially passing it along to me as she was getting too infirm to take care of it. Nikki is now 23, and that piano has lived with me through two moves since, and resides in our parlor. However, Nikki did NOT develop into a musician, professional or otherwise, and the piano has been collecting dust for many years. A few times I tried to offer it to other families with budding musicians, to no avail. I couldn't quite bring myself to list it on Freecycle. However, my latest attempt has been to see if my charter school is interested in another piano. After all, Waldorf-based education focuses on the arts and will continue to provide a solid home for this beautiful musical instrument.
Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother's death, at age 71. I have finally come to terms with the fact that having the memory of my mother playing that piano for us is far more important than keeping the object itself. Sometimes, grief takes a long time.