Oltremare

I was flipping through the late night tv channels, bored after a four episode run of Everybody Loves Raymond, and looking for something a little different. My daughter was laying in bed beside me, dictating which channels I should stop on, which ones I should pass up. It was the Arts channel as I paused she said STOP. And I did. I was spellbound by the music. Completely silenced. I watched him play. I closed my eyes. Alyssa made a remark about how she misses piano in modern day music. Then we were both quiet as we drank it in.

My Auntie Kathy used to play the piano. This music in some reminiscent way takes me back there. To the house with the orange shag carpet and the shiny yellow vinyl couch. And the piano. Her music was the background to my life, serenading me as I played dolls with my sisters, as I read books, as I did homework, and as I amused myself, learning how to sew and how to paint. She played her way through my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, weaving a silk thread through the rough fabric of my young life. It is part of who I am, something permanent, something lovely, in a world of unlovely things.
I tried to learn once or twice. I would step up to the piano, sit down and tinkle a few notes, or run my fingers down the keys high to low, as if I was playing a grand concerto for a crowd of thousands. But the only thing I ever really learned was chopsticks and that was as far as my fumbling inelegant fingers would take me. I was not blessed with the musical genius that graces my Auntie, although I can play a few songs on the guitar. The piano remains to me, a mystery. 

The last time Auntie played for us was in the back of a moving van. The piano was going to my sister's house in Colorado. She stepped up in the back of the van and she began to play. The notes rang out loud and clear in the winter air. The tears began rolling down my cheeks. I looked at my sister. She was also weeping. We didn't speak. There weren't any words that could convey the feelings as we stood there in the frosty air, just drinking in the notes as they fell from the piano, and silently crying. 

Then they went their separate ways, my Auntie and her piano, and she pretty much stopped playing anymore, other than the odd occasion now and then. 

This music makes me cry. It is so beautiful it takes my breath away. I am transported to another time and place, another piano, another piece of music. As I sit here in the middle of my bed, my daughter now sleeping beside me, that beautiful thread reaches out to me and draws me back, once again something lovely in an unlovely world.