the rusty ivories

The week before Christmas I was struck with a deadly attack of needing to play a piano. I took lessons from the age of nine to nineteen, and after quitting lessons (due to the demands of schoolwork) my daily practice ground to an eventual halt with my move last year to piano-less South Bend. (Not that there are no pianos in South Bend, but there were none to which I had access, having had to leave my own upright at home for lack of storage space and the inallowability of playing it in an apartment complex.)

So just before Christmas, when job stress became unbearable and sleep came with a fight, I felt the muscles in my arms and torso and hands and fingers aching to pour their energy into cool smooth keys. My body longed to engage in music. So I took the piano books I'd brought from home, just in case, and after work one day slipped up to the Community Room on the third floor, a vast open room which when not in use lies empty and boasts a piano. I dragged up a chair, opened a Grieg sonata, and attempted for the first time in more than a year to play something besides the simple melody I'd written in high school.

It was, of course, a disaster. Like trying to dredge your memory for fragments of a forgotten language when suddenly faced with a native Spanish-speaker in a half-emergency situation. Music I had once nearly memorized (or, in the case of Debussy, had completely memorized so that even when I couldn't find my place on the page my body remembered to play) I had to sight read. I picked over the songs for half an hour in frustration, then finally hit some sort of stride and ended in a decent tone. Roger the maintenance man came upon me playing, encouraged me, then sensitively left me alone to my struggles. I left slightly disheartened but resolved to continue relearning to ride the bicycle, as it were.

Then tonight I sat down to play my own piano, the piano that knew my fingers and my feet on the pedals from the time I was a child. It went almost like a dream. There were still rough spots that I had to stop and squint at, but the difference playing my own piano was astonishing. And when I played "Claire de Lune," my favorite piece, it was how I imagine old lovers who parted under necessary circumstances coming back together...cautiously, a little warily, with a longing and a touch of sweetness and remembered love. There were spaces where I'd never really gotten it right and had to work over with careful attention, and other places where the music and I had meshed so completely that I couldn't ever forget it. Overall it was a little clumsy, a little halting here and there, but still beautiful.

And complementarily enough, my sister's half-grown cat fell asleep next to the piano, listening.

It's been long enough that I've gone without music. I can't afford more lessons, but I can practice what I once learned. It'll have to be in the Community Room until I get my first house and can transport my childhood piano out to South Bend.

I have missed music.