Piano Lessons

I’ve been watching my own home movies lately. Who am I kidding? I’ve been watching them for years now!  I’m always struck, when sitting and watching these old movies, by something I may not have noticed before.

The home movie I watched this past week was one I made of my mother several months before she passed away. A filmmaker colleague of mine and I had driven up to visit my mother in her Berkshire home.  We filmed her in the sitting room where she talked about her second piano lesson at age six. She blew her teacher away when she played all of the pieces in the book, her homework having only been to learn one piece.

Years later, my mother graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and was on the concert track before she met my father. 

On the day of our filming, my mother recounted the numerous times she would be cooking dinner for our family, and quickly run to the piano to practice. Sitting down at the piano bench in the living room, her practice would last longer than it should have and invariably she would forget all about dinner and everything burned up. The chicken would be ruined or at the very least, too dry to eat. The vegetables would be soggy or burned. The salad would go undressed.

We may not have had the best meals in our family, but we had the most beautiful music. 

My mother had very bad arthritis in her hands and didn’t want to play for us that day but somehow, we convinced her to sit at the piano bench. I watched as she lifted her hands to the keys. After a few rough starts, she managed to play for us. Her favorite composer was Beethoven. I have her playing on videotape. Maybe it wouldn’t get her into the Conservatory these days, but it brings a whole host of memories back to me when I listen. 

And, in my book, the memories are what it's all about.