Piano Days...

Years ago, when I was a little girl, my mother had a friend that owned a beautiful Baldwin piano. At seven, I would create little songs while the two of them chatted over coffee and and talked about the greatest new thing, juicing. Mind you, I was seven in 1988, so juicing was big then, just taking off in the health world. They were into vitamins, organic living, and juicing, while I was amazed by his piano.

Back then, like I am now, I was amazed by anything that could create music. Back then, my father owned a store with a lot of antiques and other things. Often someone would bring in a musical instrument and my father would purchase it for sale. The back of his store had a huge office and paved area. He kept his antique car there with it's couch-like seats and suicide doors that was bathed in a beautiful midnight blue. When I wasn't playing with his car or twirling around in his office chair, I was playing an instrument. You name it, I figured out a way to play it. Violin, trumpet, French horn, saxophone, clarinet I played them all. It's not that I can say I made "music" then and if you've had a child or learned how to play an instrument yourself you know that the beginning sounds are more noise than anything else. But my Dad didn't care. He was great like that.

When I was eleven, my parents got divorced. It was a terrible time, more terrible than the word terrible lends itself to. My mother and I left everything in Connecticut and relocated to Pennsylvania. Not too long after being there, I received a package from my father. There was a beautiful new winter jacket and a clarinet in the box. And even though the marriage of my parents failed, I was still daddy's little girl and he understood the language of my heart more than anyone else could. His sending a musical instrument was a silent way of saying, "Honey, I know there is music, beautiful music in your heart." My mother understood too as she would say that music skipped a generation in my family and came to back to me. She would say I was like my Great Grandpa Baldoc who played the viola for the Boston Pops Orchestra.

So I started taking lessons in the fifth grade. Played in the concert band, honors band, and orchestra until I graduated from high school. My school didn't have a football team and all the cheerleaders were made fun of, so it was actually "cool" to be in the band and/or orchestra. We didn't carry the stigma of "band geek." In hind sight, it was a very healthy environment for people with artistic leanings given that it was a public high school. And after high school, my clarinet went with me to Italy. I played with a worship (music) and drama team in various parts of Italy for four and a half months. My guitar was there with me too, but that was more for private enjoyment than public display.

When I went to Thailand two months after getting back from Italy, I brought my instruments with me. I would bring my guitar to class and play with my high school students in the last 5 or so minutes of class. They loved it and it provided a good bridge between us. It seemed as though everyone in Thailand had some artistic gifting of some sort. And just as my students were somehow awed by me, they continued to amaze me. It was there that I donated my clarinet. The school had so much talent, but not enough instruments.

I wanted it to be a private thing, the donation that is. But when I told my host father (who was a teacher at the same school) that I wanted to donate my clarinet, word spread. The school officials made a little ceremony. They asked me to play for them and hence I played. They took pictures as if I was handing them some medal of honor. And I guess I was, handing them a small medal of honor, a piece of my history. It was the last gift my father had ever given me. It had made it through the streets of my hometown to the streets of Italy and into the hands of Thailand.

Back then, I was sorting through some things, trying to figure out where and what I wanted to do with my life. I was good at a lot of things (theatre, music, photography, writing, etc.), but I thought that I was not great at anything. So, I layed down many of my passions to focus on one, writing.

But when I started attending college, I kept going back to a more private and innocent love, music. I'd sneak away to the basement of my dorm and step into what I thought was a sound proof booth. Taking a break from Aristotle, Erasmus, or whoever else I was reading, I'd play my thoughts out over white and black keys. Whatever I couldn't get out in words, I could express through music. Playing piano and forte with crescendos and decrescendos, sixteenth notes to whole notes; I could somehow express what I otherwise could not.

Until one day, I stepped out of the booth to see the dormitory staff clapping. Surprise, the booth wasn't sound proof. They asked where I'd learned how to play like that and I told them I hadn't. As they asked when I'd be playing next, I felt very uncomfortable and just smiled with an "I don't know." The next semester, I took lessons and was luckily able to use the class for the honors college I was a part of. When no one was around, I'd steel moments with the baby grand in Light Auditorium. It was like I was having a private love affair with a piano... and I was. It continued until I left that university. When I came back to the US and started school in Maryland, my love affair continued. I would steel moments with the baby grand in the Memorial Chapel.

Even to this day, the words that don't find their way to paper or to screen, find their way in music. And someday, I pray that I a vision I had years ago comes true. That I come home from work and find my beautiful daughter playing the piano. Natural light is flooding the room. I put my briefcase down on the counter and sit down next to the man I adore, the man I said "I do" to. And I remember the days when she was little and making noise.