In November 2021, I got a piano. That means, as I write this blog, I’ve had it for more than a year.
I love it beyond words.
I have always wanted a piano. As a child, if I went to someone’s house and they had a piano, I couldn’t keep my hands off of it. I couldn’t understand friends that resented having to practice piano. People who played piano were magicians to me (they still are!), and I so wanted to be one of them. I loved watching people, including my Mom, walk up to a keyboard, open a hymnal and just start playing.
When I was a young girl in the 1970s, my mom got an electric Kimball organ. I think it was called The Entertainer. I remember it as having two rows of keys and a lot of colorful buttons where you could make the keys sound like a flute or a banjo or a harp or a horn or whatever. It had several pre-programmed percussions as well. I think this YouTube Video is of the kind of organ we had. There were color stickers on some of the keys and I think each color was a chord. I thought my mother was amazing when she played it. I enjoyed fiddling with it – I remember playing “The Alley Cat” and “How Great Thou Art” out of a book that came with it: I could play with one finger striking the melody and one finger on one key for the chord and “beat” from the organ.
My grandmother also had an organ, and I just remember her playing it just one time, and feeling like she was amazing also, just like anyone who could play a keyboard.
But organs aren’t pianos. Organs have such an artificial sound. Pianos sound so pure and simple. I wanted a piano!
I played guitar for a while as a teen. I wasn’t very good and too shy to play for anyone publicly, even my family. I also hated how my Dad would start almost demanding I play for him when he was drunk (I never did, BTW). I have started and stopped playing guitar a few times over the years. I’m currently trying again to play. Still not very good.
But over the years, I still have really wanted a piano.
Not quite two years ago, it dawned on me that I’m an adult and that if I want a piano, I could get a piano. I live in a one-story house. And we own the house. Getting a piano is not some impossible dream anymore. I forget sometimes that I’m an adult and can do things I want to do. Seriously. I forget sometimes that I am in my 50s and could actually try to have something or do something I’ve always wanted. I guess we just get so used to telling ourselves over many years that we’re too young or too poor or too busy for something that we get used to feeling like we can’t have something we want. We also let someone rolling their eyes at us, or outright saying, “That’s a really stupid idea,” stop us from doing things we really want to do.
The only challenge to realizing this dream was where to put the piano if I got one. I studied our house for months thinking about it. I walked around and sat at different places in the house, over and over, picturing it. Finally, I decided where it could go, and so, in August or so of 2021, I told Stefan, “I keep seeing people online giving away free pianos. I really want a piano. I’d have to pay to get it moved, but otherwise, it would be free. I’d like to take the next one I see.” It’s not so much I needed his permission, but it would alter the makeup of one of our rooms, and he’d have to listen to me, so I thought it only fair to include my husband in the decision-making.
It was, like, two weeks later, that a friend said on Facebook that she had a friend getting rid of a piano that she really wanted, but it meant letting go of the piano she, my friend, already had, and did anyone want it? She posted photos, and I jumped on it. I booked Michelle’s Piano in Portland as my movers (committed the big politically incorrect act of asking the guy on the phone where he was from, per his very thick accent. He said Egypt and was then thrilled that I’d been there and one of my favorite words is Yalla and we probably talked 10 more minutes than we needed to. But I digress…). Paid just $250 for the movers to go all the way to Canby and bring me my piano from 40 miles away.
I had imagined I would get a small upright piano, no taller than a couch. But this piano is tall – more than 4 feet tall. It is a Farrand Piano, made in Holland, Michigan. If the piano tuner read the date right, it was made in 1922. So it’s 100 years old! Its serial number is 31420. It has a beautiful, rich tone. The middle D key sometimes doesn’t play if it’s struck too softly. It probably needs some replacements inside. But I had it professionally tuned (thanks, Reverand Dan!). The piano donor passed on some beginner piano books, and another friend sent me the book Piano for Dummies. I also had a book of Beatles songs from my earlier of guitar-playing days that had a wonderful chord chart in the back, and then ordered this really cool book a friend recommended, 101 Timeless Songs Song Leader Book, (again, thanks, Reverand Dan!) that said it has really well-known songs that are simplified for playing on piano or guitar. It was altogether enough to get started teaching myself to play piano. And I started teaching myself almost immediately.
The first song I played from beginning to end, with chords, was Silent Night, out of the 101 Timeless Songs Song Leader Book. It was Christmas Eve, and Stefan had gone to Germany to spend his first Christmas with his parents since he moved to the USA in 2009. It took forever to get through the song, taking several seconds to find all the keys for each chord with my left hand, then fumbling through the melody with one finger on my right hand. But I thought it was so beautiful, I cried.
I practised at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week, usually Sunday through Thursday nights – though often, I would realize I’d been sitting at the piano for an hour. By February, I could play Amazing Grace out of 101 Timeless Songs Song Leader Book relatively well and thought, you know, I should record this so my Mom can hear it. And maybe if I practice enough, I could have a piece ready to record every month. If I did that for a year, it would be a great way to push me to learn.
So, I recorded myself playing Amazing Grace and posted it to YouTube and made the commitment to learn a piece to record every month for 12 months.
As of next month, I will have met that goal. In fact, I’ve more than met that goal: some months, I recorded two, even three songs. You can see my YouTube channel music playlist here (not just piano playing though).
I admit it: I’m proud of myself. It’s an amazing feeling to read a piece of music! It’s amazing to start off with a piece and think, geesh, I’ll never learn this, and then slowly, day after day, start to hear it get better and better. It’s wonderful to play a chord for the first time and being startled at how beautiful it sounds. It’s delightful when my fingers memorize something before I feel like my brain has. I have laughed out loud and cried sitting at that piano and playing just for myself. It’s been so delightful to learn something new, and it’s made me remember how much I loved being in high school choir once upon a time.
I’m sure it seems so silly to so many, me trying to learn to play piano in my 50s. I’m sure people have walked by my house and heard the broken pieces and wrong notes and barely-recognizable pieces and though, damn, that sounds horrible, how in the world does her husband put up with it? I’m sure there have been lots of eye-rolling. My answer: to hell with them.
I’ve really struggled, especially since early 2017, with feeling joy. When my contract work dried up thanks to a certain fascist that assumed the Presidency who didn’t fill open government positions and refused to submit budgets for any increases for agencies that used to hire me (and for three years straight, tried to eliminate one agency altogether), as well as no one wanting to hire a woman in her 50s, no matter how accomplished she is, I floundered. Hugely. Most of you have no idea just how bad it has been. For years, gardening has no longer felt Zen. Books no longer keep my attention the way they used to. For a few years, nothing on TV was interesting. Only riding my motorcycle or going on a trip gave me any kind of joy. Well, that and losing 55 pounds – that was AMAZING. I felt SO good. I love photos of me from that time. Thanks to COVID and periomenopaus, I gained every ounce back – and more – and that sent me further down this mental spiral.
Playing piano – and also guitar – has given me a daily respite, a daily sanctuary, from thinking about what hasn’t worked out, how my career is ending, how I failed to get anyone out of Afghanistan, how so much of my work is completely looked over, and all my many fears.
I’m going to keep riding my motorcycle. I’m going to keep traveling. I’m going to get back to gardening. And I did find some TV shows that kept my attention (Ted Lasso, Miss Marvel, She-Hulk, Andor). But I need a little something every day. Playing piano, playing guitar, taking language lessons on Duolingo – they are little, simple things that help me get through the day. And I didn’t realize how much I was really needing little, simple things.
Do that little, simple thing you want to do. Don’t let fears of anyone thinking it’s silly keep you from doing it. Don’t let any innervoice telling you “That’s a waste of money, you are too old, it’s not like you can ever become professional doing that, etc.” dissuade you from doing it. You don’t even have to tell anyone – just go start taking tap dancing classes or learning Chinese or saving up for that trip to Paris or reading Shakespeare aloud in your home when no one is around. It’s YOURS. It’s your life. Do it.
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