Piano Days Are Here

Little Bean Begins To Explore

We’re well into evening by the time to moving truck pulls up under the street light in front of our home.

“Is that them?” Little Bean asks.

I peek my head out the door. A moment we’ve been anticipating for a long time has arrived and my daughter is bouncing off the walls.

Over a year ago, the day after her first, live rock and roll concert and meeting the members of her favorite band, The Warning, she asked me if she could take up piano.

This came as a bit of a surprise. While she’d always loved music, and was a member of chorus at school, any attempts to interest her in actually playing an instrument had been met with mixed success. Drums. Guitar. Harmonica. None of them really stuck.

But meeting that band, and then actually being in the front row as they melted her face - something clicked with her.

And the timing was right because her school music teacher also became her private piano teacher, and having a teacher she loved made so much difference in her sticking with it. I recall having a guitar teacher at about her age that I didn’t like at all - I stuck it out for a year to keep my mom happy, but in the end, I didn’t retain any teaching and to this day have little interest in learning to play.

But maybe that will change now.

She began to learn piano, slowly, weekly, on an old electric, stand-up keyboard. She played a grand piano at her lessons. After six months, she sat at a piano at a historic New England church for a recital. She had memorized all four songs she played.

And two months ago, she wrote her first song.

It was time.

The movers are lining up long, metal ramps that extend up our front door steps. The kid runs out and does cartwheels in the grass.

“Come here, baby,” I say, “help them out.”

I position her up on the front stoop and she pulls and holds the screen door open as far as it will go.

“Oh look,” she says, “is that it?”

Her new stand-up piano is arriving.

Now, to be clear, the piano is the next step, but hopefully not the last step. When I say new, what I mean is new to us. A dear family friend was moving, and had been looking to give her piano a good home. She thought of Little Bean.

For a month now, we’d been negotiating the time and delivery - turns out moving a piano is not quite like moving a harmonica. But the day had come.

The movers position the piano for a straight shot right up into our living room and the whole move goes smoothly. This is, apparently, their eighth and final move of the day so they’re a little sore.

“Is this going to be your piano,” one of them says to her.

She nods and grins and I feel like that gives them a little boost of energy. The piano is on a rolling platform. They push it into the space and lift it up and kick away the roller, and down comes the piano in the space that will become its new home.

We’re nearly there. They go to get the stool and wrap up the ramps, but she can’t wait. Little Bean runs over to her old keyboard, grabs a music book and runs back to the piano. And then she stands there, one foot working the pedals, playing a song called Night Wing that she’d been working on with her teacher. It happens so fast I don’t even have a chance to record the first time.

The piano is dusty and thin and needs to be tuned, and she’s not yet what I would call a technically skilled pianist. She misses notes. She plays a little too softly, or bangs the keys a little too sternly. She’s more Jerry Lee Lewis than Bach.

One of the movers comes back with the piano bench and puts it down behind her, and she slides into a sit without even a word.

“She’s excited, huh?” he says.

They finish up and I follow the movers back out to their truck to wrap things up and say thanks. The evening is warm. The windows are open. And even out there on the street I can hear my daughter playing. She misses a note, but plows right through. The tinny sound echoes out into the neighborhood and I think to myself, there is music, played by my daughter, coming from my home – there in a small New England town on a late Thursday, I hear her play and all I hear is the loveliest music I’ve heard in a long time.

She hits another stale note. I hear her shout “Argh!” and then begin again. Where this goes, how long it will last, what will it all mean… unimportant for now. The music is enough. We play on.

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Housekeeping: I hope you’ll decide to join us and our new YouTube channel, Dispatches From the Rail. That’s where we’ll keep track of all our music related adventures. We’ll have a little video of the piano arrival in a couple days.

Click here to check us out: Dispatches From the Rail