Ode to a Piano (and a mother)

It is incredible how much inanimate objects can mean to someone. I am just off the phone, crying hysterically about a piano. A piano! Here I am, thousands of miles away from my family and friends, approaching a massive deadline for my PhD, and in the middle of a very stressful house move - and I am crying over a piano!

But it is not just a piano, it is the pride of our family. My mother brought it home when I was about 9 years old. Where the piano came from is still a bit of a mystery, and being a child I never asked. Looking back it seems ridiculous, we could never afford such a luxury and I have no idea how my mother managed it. It was beautiful. Dark mahogany wood, hand carved roses adorning the music rest. It was beaten and scratched and in need of a good polish, but it was breathtaking none the less. I remember thinking that the keys were rather more yellow than I had expected (I had never seen a piano up close), and when I hit the first few notes it was clearly out of tune - not that I would have known what in tune should sound like. I didn't take lessons, but I played the piano every day at first. I am sure it was pure noise, driving all of the neighbours in our apartment block insane, but I 'practised' to my heart's content. My mother had never taken a lesson either, and she could not read a note of music, but she used to sit and listen to music and try to bang out the notes on the keys - often with great success. But my favourites were the songs she wrote herself. Hearing them now they would likely seem simple and plain, but back then I was sure she was a musical genius.

The piano moved with us time and again, thanks mainly to a friend of my mother's who managed to get people to move it for free. Recently my mother decided she was tired of moving it from place to place and resolved to get rid of it. I begged her told on to it for a bit longer so that I might take it with me to Ireland when I could afford to and she agreed. But today she said she had agreed to give it away. She offered my piano to another family whose children wanted a piano but who could not afford to buy one. This was, of course, a noble thing for my mother to do. She is handing on the piano in what I can only assume was the same manner by which we came to possess it. In a karmic universe, surely this is the answer. I know it is selfish and childish, and I do want to pass on that same joy I felt to another family, but I can't bare someone else having something that is so much a part of our lives.

Every memory I have of that piano is a memory of my mother, but more importantly it is a memory of my mother being the kind of mother I had always wanted her to be. When I played she listened intently and told me how beautiful it sounded. We sat together on the bench and she patiently taught me the songs she had written note by note. When I listened to her playing the piano, she was no longer my mother the waitress/house cleaner/embarrassing single-parent who was younger,angrier and more crass than all the other mothers. When she played, she was my mother: pianist and composer. She was beautiful and talented, a peaceful and calm woman who naturally possessed the gift of music. Even today, even with my awareness of the simplicity of her piano skills, watching her play fills me with a sense of pride admiration and love.

For all of these reasons, the piano is our family legacy. It is my mother's legacy to me - a symbol of something beautiful in a relationship otherwise tainted by anger and resentment. My greatest memories of my mother all revolve around that instrument, and it is the only thing that my family carried with it each time we left a tiny apartment filled with hand-me-down for another tiny apartment filled with more hand-me-down furniture. It was ours, properly ours. A family heirloom to be passed through the generations along with the silly little songs my mother wrote on it. It is more than just an object, it is a metaphor for everything my mother has done for us. She gave us that piano almost impossibly, just as she gave us opportunities that the odds said we would never have. How does a single woman working as a part-time waitress, living on food stamps with two children under the age of ten afford a hand carved piano? The same way she sent us to ballet class, paid the rent and bought Christmas presents - any way she could. She did anything she needed to do to give us what she thought we needed. That is why I cried for our piano today.