Finding the joy. I’ve decided that’s the main goal of my return to playing the piano. As a girl, from the age of five until I opted out at the age of about fourteen, I took piano lessons. Serious piano lessons. Following in the footsteps—or I might say the fingerprints—of my three-years-older sister, I became the pint-size student of Mrs. Blim, a pint-size teacher who owned two grand pianos that took up the entire living room in her cottage-like home on Wornall Road.

From there, as our family traveled the world via my dad’s military assignments, our mother secured piano teachers for us wherever we were. She must have spent major money, especially during the time my sisters, including the next younger, climbed in the Ford station wagon every Saturday morning to be driven from the North Shore of Long Island into the heart of Manhattan. Our teacher was Jewel Bethany Hughes, a concert pianist who lived in a glamorous brownstone townhouse just off of Fifth Avenue. Later we took lessons in Madrid from another concert pianist, Milli Porta, who spoke no English. We learned to speak piano in Spanish: Albéniz, de Falla, Granados.

One of our early recitals is preserved from about 1957. I’ve had it transcribed over the years from reel-to-reel to cassette tape to CD, if only to be reminded that my sisters and I could really and truly once-upon-a-time play the piano remarkably well.

Why did I stop? Thinking back to those long, dark hours of practicing piano before school in the morning, as our mother insisted, I tend to believe I learned the technique, but never the pleasure. I learned to play the notes, with practiced tenderness, but never with exuberant ease. I learned how, but perhaps never why. It was someone else’s dream. Meanwhile, my true happiness and calling fell to words. My lifelong playground.

But…it’s never too late. My husband, an otter of creativity—-always playfully involved in some productive activity—-liked to play, although we left behind the old clunker of a piano he owned when we moved in together. We sometimes spoke wistfully about that old piano. Eventually I concluded that playing again might be good exercise for my ageing brain cells. So we bought a piano. I signed up for lessons. And the rest is…well, not history yet, but an ongoing story.

Perhaps I’ll never be quite the delightful improviser my husband is, always discovering and exploring on the keyboard. But I might yet master (again) Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Pathétique. I may someday deliver Für Elise with élan. And I will often remember my mother listening hopefully in the wee hours of the morning to countless faulty repetitions of The Happy Farmer. Thanks anyway, Mom.

 
THE METRONOME
 
How she complains against the metronome
let loose to discipline her clever hands.
It changes she insists when accents roam
awkwardly from the measure it demands.
And she, hurrying over the notes she knows
or gingerly laggard at the tricky part,
asserts her independence as she goes
after the heedless rhythms of her heart.
This tension teaches how my will may go
stubborn and reckless while the beat is clear,
halting or quick, precipitate or slow,
despite instruction clicking in my ear,
until at last my little tune is done
and time unmeasured makes all tempos one.
 
Barbara Loots 1981