Piano Lessons 5

After many years and several different teachers I was assigned to a teacher that was new to the program but not new to teaching music. She had a great ear and a dynamic, encouraging teaching style.  She paid attention more than anyone else every had.  I was very excited.  Working with her would be tough but rewarding.

After a couple weeks I was told that she had decided not to join the program but would teach on her own out of her home.  Years of useless attempts at interactive communication at home had taught me that the answer to every question was “no.”.  Finally, my junior year of high school I walked out of Illinois Wesleyan University’s Music Building and their Piano Pedagogy Department.

At college I met many people my age who could play much more difficult music than I ever tried and would sound better at the first sitting than I would after months of teaching my fingers where to go.  Sometime after college I found out from my mother that she always wanted me to be able to just sit down at the piano and have fun with it; to play like my grandmother played.  My grandmother had a whole notebook full of popular songs going back to the ’30s and would pound them out during holiday get togethers while my aunts sang along.

All those years of classical piano lessons, all those hours of practicing, all that frustration at no support and no way out, all those other things I didn't get to do and none of it was for me.  It didn't raise my mother's esteem for me.  She did not respect me any more for it.  It was just to fulfill her desire to be like her mother that she couldn’t do for herself.

I haven't touched a piano in decades.

Invisible

My oldest brother, Steve, is 6 years older than I am.  We look like brothers but no one has ever mistaken one of us for the other.  Starting in 7th grade, after every public appearance, my mother would say to me, “You sure looked like Steve up there.” She said this seriously as if I was to take it as a great compliment.  Even though I respected my older brother, it seemed like a non sequitur from the beginning. 

She was completely consistent, saying it after every junior high band concert, Boy Scout awards ceremony, high school marching band performance, concert band performance, piano recital, summer band camp concert, Honor Society ceremony, high school graduation; “You sure looked like Steve up there.”

University of Illinois Marching Band members are given two free season tickets each year to give to their parents.  My parents were long since divorced but I was able to just give them the tickets and they would hand them off between themselves. 

The seats weren’t great.  They were in a corner of the lower deck, far from the action and not up high enough to see very well.  When I was in it, the Marching Illini was 300 strong; almost all wearing the same uniform and brass instruments covered our faces.  After the first game my freshman year; “You sure looked like Steve out there.”

Piano Lessons 4

My teacher recommended me for a special program that was an evaluated performance in front of a judge.  If you received high marks for 10 years in a row you won a college scholarship.  The first year went ok.  The 2nd year I planned to play a challenging Chopin piece. I could play the piece just fine.  I had the technical ability and the musicality.  Chopin is known for having had large hands and wrote music that requires more than an octave reach.  My hands don't seem large but my fingers are long and I could reach all the notes.

But the level of concentration required to memorize the order of the themes and repeats could not be achieved at home and I floundered on stage.  After the director walked up and let me know I had gone over the allowed time I met my mother at the back of the auditorium and we walked home. She mentioned several times how embarrassed she was while I was fumbling at the keyboard.  She found the whole experience very embarrassing. How I felt? She never asked.

Fatherly Advice

I don't know how my brothers learned the facts of life, but I do remember that when the time came my father ignored his usual Depression Era spending plan and gave my older brothers really nice electric shavers.  I waited as long as I could but finally had to teach myself to shave using my mother's leg razor.  That summer at Boy Scout Camp one of the Scoutmasters had a disposable razor and encouraged me to use it.

Not to completely abandon his duties, a couple years later my father said to me, “You know, you're getting to the age where you need to start trimming your nose hairs.”

Piano Lessons 3

Each spring the piano pedagogy department gave a recital in the university's nicest music auditorium.  Each student would walk across the stage, play their best piece on the music department's best concert grand, bow, and walk off.

There was a whole system:  All of the kids sat in one section by the stage door.  While one student was playing one would be waiting backstage for their turn to walk out and one would be waiting in their seat for their turn to walk back stage.

One year early in my career my grandmother came down for the spring recital.  Her first name was Mildred.  After the program she and my mother and father were standing around her car talking before she headed back home.  While talking my father called her “Millie.”  Even at that young age, and despite my mother’s and grandmother’s grace at not acknowledging the insult, I could tell that it wasn't right for him to call her by that name.

Several years later, at home after the recital, I picked up my father’s printed program.  He had written a one word review of each of the performers.  Several of the 16 and 17 year old girls were “sexy.”  I was “average.”

Piano Lessons 2

My piano teacher, usually frustrated that I hadn't practiced much, was ecstatic one week when the lesson went really well and said that if I practiced like that every week I'd be the best student in their program.  At home my father didn't have anything to do with me.  He was dismayed that one of his sons, already not the butchest boy on the block, was continuing to take piano lessons.  One of my brothers was openly hostile and my mother considered getting the lessons paid for completed her part and expected me to do the rest.  In the passive-aggressive logic of the Midwest she didn't like it any more than my father did that she had a not-butch son taking piano lessons, but made a great show of disappointment whenever I hinted at possibly doing something else.  

I knew I wasn't the butchest kid on the block because one day the kid next door (we were friends, but not great friends; mostly we were somebody to do stuff outside with for each other) said that the previous evening, while they were all watching television, his father had said that I was a pansy.  He did not say this in a mean or taunting way, just matter-of-factly his father had said that I was a pansy.

Piano Lessons 1

Just as some mothers are determined that one of their sons will grow up to be a priest, my mother was determined that one of her sons would learn to play the piano.  She was able to harass my father into the expense despite his preferred spending plan of acting like it was the Depression, and his complete failure to understand why anyone would need anything that he did not. 

So one summer my two older brothers took piano lessons from this nice lady who had a cute house with a steep gable over the front door.  They, wisely, were horrible at it; trying to learn their pieces at the last minute just before the final recital, one of my brothers breaking out in tears, my father looking on proudly, my mother, not too disappointed, realized this wasn't going to work.

A couple years later I started piano lessons with Mrs. Schafer who had a piano studio in her finished basement.  Stupidly, I showed some aptitude for it; learning how to read music and the key signatures and the scales fairly quickly.  After a year her husband got a job out of town and I started taking lessons at the university two blocks away.

Apology

In that letter where my father said he didn't think Mom “would do that” he went on to blame everything that went wrong with our family on our mother.  He didn't mention that, as undisputed head of the household in all things, a role he insisted was his, he might be at least partly at fault. 

In the letter my father justified his blamelessness on being a workaholic and a man of the church, spending time at meetings and classes.  He didn't mention time spent pursuing other women.  One year he took another woman to his office Christmas party.  Another time he had a vasectomy without telling my mother, but she connected the dots of how he was acting when he called in sick to work.

Also in that letter my father expressed his regret at not being around more when I “made my decision.”  My father was a very intelligent man.  It's too bad that he put his intelligence into learning conspiracy theories instead of learning to respect his intelligent son.  After not talking for 2 years he cornered me at my Aunt's funeral, told me I looked sunburnt and skinny and proceeded to expound on the latest theory that being a gay man equaled having AIDS.  I was tan and fit in a room full of pastey, fat people destined to die of heart disease, starting with him.  Seven years later my uncle found him in his apartment.

Tattletale

When I was little my father would spend most evenings working late and leaving my mother to single-handedly manage 3 young, rambunctious boys by herself.  That's not redundant:  I mean single-handedly literally.  She survived polio at the age of 2 but was left with little use of her left arm.

My mother would send me to my father's office to keep him company.  Then she wasn't bothered by my walking nearly a mile across town in the dark by myself.  But one year after the YMCA Halloween Party I watched all of the other kids get picked up by their parents, waited a while longer, then decided walking home alone was better than sitting on a downtown street corner alone.  This was a walk I'd made dozens of times after swim lessons. But this time she was furious that I had set off in the dark by myself.  When she got home she screamed at me and got out the belt.

Those evenings when I got to my father's office he'd let me play on the office machines.  I especially remember the large adding machine with all of the numbers lined up down the front of it and a big handle to pull to make it do the calculation.  One time when I got there the office was dark and the door was locked so I just walked back home.

Discipline

When I was 3 and 4 years old my mother would get so mad she would whip me with a belt; hard and for a long time.  I have no memory of what, if anything, I did to incite such wrath; probably just trying to get some kind of attention.  I remember trying to talk to her and she’d keep walking away.  At one point I said, “ Mom, I'm trying to talk to you.  Please stop walking away.”  She said I could talk to her but that I would have to follow her around; she had no time to stop.  The beatings were so bad that my father had to take a break from working late to make her stop.  Many years later I got a letter from him saying, “I didn’t think your mother would do that.”

At times both my brothers and both my parents would be yelling at me all at once about how awful, unreasonable, and irresponsible I was.  I’d have to tell them it was completely unfair for all of them to yell at me at once and that if they were going to yell at me they could only do it one at a time.  It was the only point I ever successfully got across.

I do remember wondering why suddenly the beatings stopped and things improved for me at home.  From then on I was more polite and forever more subdued.

Graham Street

We moved into a large, green shingle-sided house on Graham Street 2 blocks from a small Methodist university and 1/2 a block from Franklin Elementary School that had this awesome fire escape. It was an enclosed grey spiral slide down from the 2nd floor that the kids in the upper grades got to slide down during fire drills.  I got through Mrs. Cranberry’s ( Cranapple’s? ) Kindergarten class just in time for the school district to announce that they were closing the school to general education students.  The next year I started walking 9 blocks across town to Bent School.

Bent School is a very nice building that had been built as a high school and then was relegated to lower grades as newer high schools and junior highs were built.  I remember my father nearly yelling at a school board meeting over the closing of Franklin School, saying he'd moved his family to be close to the school they would be attending.  I was the youngest of three so his plan had nearly worked. For my part I was sorely disappointed I never got to go down that fire escape.

Catherine Street

When I was born our family lived in a small house on Catherine Street across from the railroad yard.  I only remember one Christmas having a package in my hands with a toy airplane in it and asking if it was mine before  opening it.  I also remember peeking through the crack of a pair of locked doors to a garage at the car inside and being reprimanded for being where I knew I shouldn't.  We moved when I was three.  Later we would go back to visit the neighbors who I was supposed to remember as these great family friends, even though I wasn't old enough to remember much of anything when we lived there.

Quote

 “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.” 

                  -  Elie Wiesel