For the duration of my childhood, we had an old upright piano in our basement. It was turquoise. I don’t know when it became turquoise, but that is the only color I ever remember it being. Moving a piano into a basement is no easy task, I would imagine. The story goes, they had to remove the basement steps to put the thing down there.
But there it sat, always against the north wall, the top stacked to the ceiling with old 78s and sheet music. None of us were musicians, I’d say. I mean, my Mom played the piano, and her songs were sweet. She could read music. But it wasn’t like she was a step away from Carnegie Hall or anything. My eldest brother was in the band in high school. I am pretty certain he played the clarinet. But it was never like he pulled it out of the case in the evenings and serenaded us. Another sister picked up the guitar during her high school years. Again, she could sing and play beautifully, all of it chord play, and mostly in open E to fit the Joni Mitchell songs she sang.
I’d say, for the most part, we were not musicians. Though everyone of us loves to sing, and we all have mostly decent voices. But certainly not one step away from Broadway. When my eldest brother married, he asked the five sisters to sing in the wedding. We did, and it was disastrous. I never listened to the recording, as I don’t think I could bear it. It was painful as we sang. The longest four minutes of my life, I think. Maybe his too. I’ve told him I was sorry about how bad we were.
No. The Von Trapps we were not. None of us played that piano, besides learning a few clunky simple songs, and of course, the full chopsticks regalia. We had a xylophone in the basement too. Again, it sat untouched, most of the time. I was thinking of that thing out of the blue the other day and had to ask all my siblings if they had the lonesome xylophone. Its post-Kronenberger-life is a mystery.
In our adult lives, one sister sings in choirs and chorus groups. Yet another sister plays guitar and sings harmonies like a boss. She can drum, also. But all of us cherish music deeply, and we appreciate the goodness it brings to our lives.
It is like that with so many things in life. We don’t have to have the skill to appreciate the skill. We don’t have to be athletes to love watching sports. We don’t have to be fine artists to appreciate paintings. Nor great cooks, to love food. We certainly don’t have to be actors, to enjoy watching stage and films.
In fact, it seems that sometimes the worse we are at something, the more we can appreciate someone else’s adeptness, their mastery, their skills.
This is yet another good reminder of the gifts in our world — the boons. We are living in a place filled with people. And each one of us has a talent to share with the world. We don’t have to stand on stage to share it. We can do whatever we do, in private or in public, to make this world a better place to be. If knitting potholders is our gig, it will be a fine, fine, day when we can share one with another person. If it is growing tomatoes, what a success the world will know when a friend wedges that fruit between some bacon and lettuce.
Our good little measures add up to the bigger good. It extrapolates. Multiplies. It moves forward. We may think we are just playing chopsticks. But to someone else? It may sound like a symphony.
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“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems
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“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
― Marcel Proust
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“For it is in giving that we receive.”
― St. Francis of Assisi
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