My Mother Was Not “Finished” With the Piano…

Up until somewhere around 1996 or so I had a big beef with my mother.

You see, in seventh grade I wanted to learn how to play the piano, and after a lot of begging, my mother went to the Wilmington Piano Company and for $175 (how in the world does a 7th grader remember these things?) she bought me an upright piano and somehow it ended up in our cluttered, hoarders-like house in Harmony Hills.

The piano had been painted a mustard yellow with house paint.

I used to listen through our open window to the teenage neighbor, Lisa, whose house in our development was about thirty feet between our back doors…and she was playing Moonlight Sonata, possibly Fur Elise, and Brian’s Song.

I wanted to do that.

And so, because my home and childhood was so very abnormal…not being permitted to join Girl Scouts or do all the things I perceived my friends did…I begged…and like the Pyrrhic Victories that I often perceive have characterized my sixty years on earth…I won.

Meaning…I got myself a piano. Through begging and pleading, and probably anger and tears…and arguments between my parents over money…they took me to the Concord Mall and I wandered around the store, looking at pianos.

A twelve-year-old child who felt a little musical…and I must have touched Steinways and Wurlitzers and who knows what that day…and I vaguely recall my mother talking with the sales person and us looking at the used pianos…and I remember…the weird excitement I felt when I was shown the old, heavy upright painted mustard yellow piano…for $175…how much does that equal between 1976 and 2023?

I don’t know. But…they bought it.

My dad was somewhere…I think he came into the store. Maybe in and out.

Hours…hours…did it really take hours for my mother to swing some deal for this piano and get it delivered to our house? With talk and arguments about whether the thing was going to break a hole in the floor and not have enough joist support?

I don’t know.

But the thing came…and…I played it.

At first I experimented. And then…my mother…who in her younger years had played piano…began to try to teach me to read the music.

Oh those hot summer nights…I believe…I believe…this must have occurred after my mother’s first hospitalization in March 1976 at the Delaware State Hospital.

Yes.

It’s gotta be. Because…my father had his first heart attack days later…and…and…we didn’t have a piano then. In fact, I stayed for two weeks with those neighbors…and…sometimes…I would sneak a touch on Lisa’s piano…oh how I wanted a piano…like Lisa had…

Fast forward to my father’s death in May 1979…and then…my mother’s receipt of the insurance money. Suddenly, I was left alone with her.

And suddenly, she was going up to Cox Auto on Kirkwood Highway and trading in one of my father’s old Dodges…and…and…she went back to Wilmington Piano Company and bought…an organ…yes…some type of razzle dazzle organ with buttons that created orchestra, winds and all kinds of percussive rhythms and sounds...and…and…she took my likely 100+ year old upright mustard yellow piano that by then I was playing some Bach fugues and other pieces along with Fur Elise, The Spinning Song, Brian’s Song…the beginning of Moonlight Sonata…and all kinds of pop music and chords and whatnots…she took it (well, planned it) to Wilmington Piano Company and we wandered around trying out different brand new pianos until it was decided that we would have this Wurlitzer.

I was sixteen years old but I felt…uneasy…it was like…temptation. And I wasn’t even religious at that point. In fact, I had gone numb on “religion” possibly, the day my father died. Or maybe…just maybe…it was when I was on the corner trying to smoke a joint and hide it from him in April 1979…with my neighborhood friends…and I had become a teenager, not wanting to get up on a Sunday morning to go to church with my Daddy…like we always had done…it fizzled out…as I entered high school…but yeah…here I was…alone with my mother summer of 1979…wandering Wilmington Piano Store and trying out all kinds of pianos…

She bought it.

She bought the Wurlitzer with my father’s life insurance money.

And you know what?

I liked it.

Yeah…talk about guilt.

I liked this thing. The touch of the keyboard…its pristine sound and tune…

Oh the guilt that might have been there. My father was dead, my upright mustard yellow piano was gone…and now…I had a Wurlitzer piano to bang away on…and we had a 1976 Electric Blue Buick Century…and you know what???

I demanded to take driver’s ed.

Yeah…it had been a point of contention when my father was alive. I could only push so far…to be permitted to take driver’s ed in 10th grade and she refused.

But then…he was dead.

I could yell and scream at her freely and tell her, “They offer it is summer school. I’ve signed up already.”

(Something like that…or…maybe…just maybe…I yelled and screamed enough to win…to win yet another pyrrhic victory of learning to drive and getting my license…)

Oh geez Louise…now…my father is dead and I’m a Wurlitzer-playing, 1976 Buick Century driving teenager.

____

Fast forward to 1987. I’ve been married two years and we move into a duplex…and…and…we are struggling financially…but…but…I want the piano. I want the Wurlitzer.

In my mind, it is my piano. And my mother won’t give it to me. She says, “Maybe in the future, when you are in a permanent home you own.”

We buy a mobile home. I beg for the piano. She says, “Maybe in the future, when you are not living in a trailer.”

We move to a ranch house in Newark, our first home that we owned. She says, “I’m not finished with the piano yet.”

_____

Somewhere around the time…around 1995-1996…a friend from church had a piano to give away. This piano was not a full upright but close to it…and…it was painted white.

We became the owners of a white, painted piano.

And, I tried to pick up on all the music I played regularly so long ago…and…I began to teach my oldest son (and another little girl from church) how to play. I got my music books from my mother…and…God brought piano back into my life.

In 2001 my mother passed away. And then, we loaded the Wurlitzer on either a friend’s truck or a small U-Haul and got it to the home we owned at Webb Road. I don’t recall what we did with the white piano that had come from Chaz…I believe we gave it away to someone.

For the life of me…it’s all a blur and I don’t recall…

_______

Tonight…December 18th at around 1:30 in the morning…after working in Photoshop a couple hours and having a beer or two to relax…a series of thoughts made me think, “I should go downstairs and play the piano…”

Admittedly, I don’t play it as much as I would like.

I’m overwhelmed, and it seems so frivolous when I’m struggling daily to work…work…work…and pay bills…who has time to make music, too?

But I felt like God was pressing me…go down there and play something…I had a Christmas carol in my mind and wondered…might I be able to play it by ear?

I went down…like an obedient child and fumbled around with it…and kept thinking…I’ve got to press on…keep recovering from all of this I’ve been dealing with…higher…higher…maybe…somehow…I can still bring music back into my life, too…and I thought about my mom, especially…“I’m not done with the piano…”

Time and age comes to us all and we gain perspective on some things….

While I will never quite understand why my mother wouldn’t have at least helped me, as a young married person, purchase another “$175 used piano”–the joy I get when my sons play and if they would want “my piano” now and I “wasn’t done with it” I would try to gift them another…for their joy–I now can think about the possibility that she truly was not “finished with that piano.”

She would occasionally play and surely…she was a lonely soul with all of her deep mental issues…to the end…

Tonight…I think of my mother…and the possibility that she might have touched this keyboard at 1:30 am too…I mean…she was a “night” person but I do believe in a different way than me…

And now…for something completely different…

Did anyone out there know that my mother was attempting to be a music major prior to her brothers and a sister showing up on the campus of West Virginia University in 1946 and un-enrolling her against her will?

I wish I had the time to keep writing…on the family stuff…that gives new perspective of sorts…maybe…I don’t know…

To write, or to play a piano in any semi-free moments…that is the question…