By sarah dragonfleyes@excite.com
Date: 29 January 2001
the piano
we have a piano. it is an old upright, with oak stained paneling. the ivory keys are either yellowed with age, or missing. remnants of glue clinging the wooden underbelly. some keys don't move when your finger touches them. others, a hollow sound. i learned how to play piano on those keys. the discordance that would emerge from our house, now makes me smile.
my mother would teach piano lessons on that old piano. A friend of my mothers gave it to her to hold onto, while he went away, he never came back. there was an old light that sat on top of it. the kind you had to hold down the switch for a while, and wait for the light to flicker on casually by itself.
she never played that piano, aside from the lessons. she wouldn't play for us. But she would play her guitar. Strumming the chords softly, creating songs for us to fall asleep by.
I grew used to the piano, gathering dust in the corner. I stopped my piano lessons and never touched it. My brother, never wanted anything to do with it, he wanted to learn drums.
My mother met men over that piano, father's of her students. One even stayed a while, brought roses. They sat on the piano. He promised to marry my mother, but then later on committed suicide. It was soon after that, that my mother never gave lessons again. Ivory fell off the keys on a regular basis now. We didn't know how old it was. But it looked weary and worn, nursing its sadness of lost music.
My mother married a man then, and he took the piano to his house. There it sat in another corner. It hasn't been played for ten years now. Pictures sit on it, of me, my cat, my brother's wedding, my parents wedding. It's a catchall for keys, and hats when people come home. A new electric one that sounds like a real one, sits downstairs. My mother plays that every night.
I think about that piano, and the loves that were lost over that piano. I think somewhere along the line i lost my mothers love over that piano as well. I had touched it, so maybe somehow the sadness that was part of the piano is now a part of me.
I dont' know who the piano will go to one day, but maybe its a legacy it carries with it. Maybe that is why that man never came for his piano. Maybe he knew the magic it had.
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