Movin’ Out

“Oof! This is mentally exhausting!” I said.

“Yes. For me it is an attachment to those movies and plays, but it was your life!” Alana said.

She was correct. Again. Sigh.

I won’t go into the horrid details of what it’s like when you live through a dishwasher disaster one year into a global pandemic, just shortly after a gigantic container ship blocked the Suez Canal. I figure you all have your tales to tell from these times.

Suffice to say, our stories — lately — have centered around a somewhat unfortunate remodel of our kitchen that required us to move a couple of items that had been undisturbed for years.

It’s true. Not only did we have to move a piano, we also had to move the cabinet that held our collective, hard-copy music from the Before Times. Which is a bit more complicated than it sounds.

For us, the Before Times included, but were not limited to:

• Before the unfortunate dishwasher incident of 3/31/21
• Before we built our current house
• Before we purchased a piano (during a Piano Emergency Sale!)
• Before we purchased our first house
• Before we met each other
• Before we moved to the Pacific Northwest
• Before I abandoned my hopes of being a professional musician
• Before either of us graduated from various institutions of higher learning
• Before both of us graduated from various institutions of secondary education
• Before we graduated from various insitutions of primary education
• Before we were acknowledged by various religious organizations as members

So there we were, crouched on the floor of our home office looking at each and every sheet of music that had crossed our various thresholds for well over fifty years. 

We started with three piles:

• Classical,
• Pop, and
• To-be-repaired.

Among the “to-be-repaired” pile was various pages of the Billy Joel Songbook. There were Brenda and Eddie. There was a New York State of Mind. There were pieces of Anthony working at a grocery store, saving his pennies for someday. Our agreement at the time was that we would repair the to-be-repaired and then decide which pile the repaired music would become a part of. 

Suddenly, and without warning, there were more than three piles:

• Classical
• Semi-classical
• Collections
• Collections of Broadway Musicals
• Stuff I used to like to play
• Stuff I couldn’t ever play
• Stuff we can’t remember
• Stuff Mrs. Dwyer (a neighbor we haven’t seen for a score of years), dumped on us when she saw we had a piano
• To-be-repaired
• To-be-repaired and then discarded
• To-be-repaired and then given away
• To-be-given-away
• To-be-returned to Tams Whitmark
• To-be-recycled and never spoken of again

It was, for me, excruciating. 

I won’t bore you with the details, but I sat on that floor in the beam of an overly bright sunny day and gazed into my past through a vastly different microscope. Every single piece of music held something of my emotional well-being. My hopes. My fears. My insecurities. My pride. My envy. 

My age. 

It’s a little more than worrisome that something that so clearly defined me had become something I used to be. And I flashed on just about every moment of playing those pieces. Stumbling over passages. Recovering. Stumbling again. Recovering.

In the midst of this I remembered a drive I was taking with my mother who made me promise to “Never give up my music.” Perhaps she saw that as my entrance ticket into a different world she had hoped for me. Or maybe just a return on her investment of so many years of lessons, and so many instruments and so many recitals and concerts and performances and time began to swirl into a vortex of something I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to avoid. 

Was this regret? 

I used to talk my mom out of clearing the dinner dishes if I could use that time after dinner to practice. She never refused. 

And I would whip through my required pieces I needed to get ready for my weekly lesson. And my dad would sometimes say, “A little soft pedal there. A little soft pedal.” He could never really abide loud things. But when he knew I was tiring, or when he knew he’d had enough. Or when there was something on the television he wanted to watch, he’d say, “Let them Begin the Beguine!” And I would have to pull out the Reader’s Digest Family Songbook and play that Cole Porter number. 

And I knew it was the end of my practice session. 

Today, I vowed to commit to at least an hour a week of sustained piano practice. 

And it’s different. 

Long ago, I learned there is a vast difference between practicing the piano, and playing the piano. 

Today I learned that sense memory, regret, and attempting to keep a promise is vastly different than riding a bicycle.