The Piano of Townsend Avenue

When I was about 4, someone gave me a pint sized baby grand. I mean, it looked like a baby grand, had a little stool to match, but it was for a child. I don't recall that I played it much. I do recall that at kindergarten about a year later, Mother Anna, already probably well past 80 years old, helped me learn "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a real sized piano, although only an upright, in our one room school house. (The rest of the school was in the main building up the hill; suddenly I think of the crab apple trees that surrounded the kindergarten house, now long gone, probably both the classroom and the trees). Somewhere between the ages of 4 and 5 then, the idea of playing a piano, for real, took hold of me.

I told my parents. I even insisted. I don't know for certain, but I think they figured it was a passing fancy of their only child, but by the time I was 9, and still talking of lessons, apparently, they relented. For two dollars a week I could take classes in the music corridor (there were about four or five rooms) taught by another nun, was it Mother Regina, hmmmm, so long ago my memory is sadly fading, who herself was a prodigious talent, at least to my ears. I don't recall if I asked for an actual piano of my own, but, in order to practice regularly, I suppose, one was called for. And so, the piano, a mahogany Hardman and Peck, came to the one bedroom apartment on Townsend Avenue. It came to the bedroom. My bedroom, as my parents by then were sharing a Castro Convertible in the living room.

This was 1963. The piano was One Thousand Dollars, quite a sum for those days. I think Dad paid for it, "on time", one hundred dollars a month. It sat in front of the wall that was covered in full size mirrors. There are several photographs of me, ones in which I appear to be grimacing at the idea of being forced to pose on the piano stool, pretending to play in one dress up outfit or another. While that piano sat in my bedroom, I grew up into a teenager of 16. The piano moved with us to Giles Place, a far larger apartment, two bedrooms, and a living room that could easily house it as a kind of centerpiece amid similarly red and brown colored decor and, even more full sized mirrors. By this time, my enthusiam for music, but more particularly, practice, had diminished in direct proportion to the requests for public performances when I felt unready for them.

After an embarrassing last recital in which I forgot the piece I was playing requiring that the music be brought to me (I can still hear the click click of the heels of the classmate whose long walk to me enhanced the shame of my not having practiced enough to have fully memorized the music and the remonstration of the teacher, who had long before replaced Mother Regina, of the consequences of a lack of practice), the Piano of Townsend Aveneue and Giles Place was touched infrequently. I was 17.

After my mother died, while I was in college, the piano took on a nostalgic aspect. It came into my life when we were an intact family. She had no doubt been a key instigator in the original purchase as she wanted for me access to education and opportunity she had not been given. It resonated their hopes and wishes. I don't think I had any thought of any of that, but, when it came to my decision to move to Los Angeles some years later, I knew for certain that the piano had to come with me. My father could not quite understand it since I played so little, what need had I of it. But it was the one and only thing that moved cross country after me, courtesy of my father given my penurious state at the age of 27 taking a stab at living across the country.

Dad moved here shortly after I did, and when he'd stop by he'd play portions of a couple of dance like phrases on it. His instrument of choice was primarily the mandolin. We were so much the same he and I, both of us playing after a fashion, but neither really able to commit to the time and patience practice requires.

The piano was a repository for phones, lamps, photographs, papers over the years. It was overwaxed and scratched and dented. The dust gathered in various crevices. The music holder fell off. One of the connections to the bench broke.

About a year and a half after dad died, I looked around my cluttered apartment, which included the poster board of pictures used at his funeral I hadn't moved. It hadn't been a morbid thing, just maybe a kind of an unrealistic and illusory stopping of time. I knew that as time moved on, despite my feeble efforts, so must I. I decided to stay in this apartment but to purge all but the essential. It came to me that the piano of Townsend Avenue, now nearly fifty years old, was an essential. I treated it to renovation, outside and inside. It has been repaired and sanded and restained. And tuned to concert pitch. I know it is the same piano because I see just a soupcon of an old nail polish stain from one of my perfunctory ticklings of the ivory over the adult years.

And, I have begun to play it again. A circle closing.