Music is my Life
My son is a pianist.
When I was a little girl, I always wished that we had a piano. Our neighbour had a piano and every evening at six o'clock wonderful melodies crept through the damp walls of our house and transformed our terraced house into a palace. I was drawn out of poverty and wrapped in an enchanted blanket of sound. Notes danced into our living-room and crept discreetly out through the dark, heavy curtains that isolated our hall from the outside world.
When our neighbour passed away the silence became deafening. This cultivated lady had had very few friends and no living relatives. She had befriended a poor young artist. She used to buy his paintings so that he could put bread on the table. When she died the artist had become famous. T.S. Lowry paintings were worth a fortune. The paintings quickly found new homes and all that was left was her old piano.
It was big and clumsy. Nobody knew what to do with it, until they found the old lady's will. My dream had come true. She had left her piano to me.
I was so glad. I thought I could sit in front of my beautiful piano and my fingers would know what to do, but they didn't.
My mother arranged for me to have piano lessons. Every evening I was forced to play scales and boring tunes over and over again. Sometimes I would refuse and she would take of her slipper and hit my head until my ears began to ring.
-You wanted a flaming piano. It took six geezers to get the bloody thing through the bleeding door and into the house. You're bloody well going to learn to play it!
Months turned into years and the piano became my enemy. When I left home to go to university in Birmingham the piano stayed at home with my parents. For manys years I forgot my love-hate relationship with the piano but when my parents died the piano moved in with me again. It tempted me with its beauty everytime I went past it in the morning and I saw it last thing at night before I went to bed. Now I had two small children of my own. I could see that they had begun to love the old piano.
They wanted to play with the magnificant old instrument and I knew I could not touch the keys. Only heavy memories of the past crept into my head when I started to play. I placed our big soft settee in front of the piano so the boys could reach the ivory keys and punish them for the pain they had caused me. First they banged as all small boys do, but then something almost magical happened.
At night when I put the boys to bed I used to sing to them. I sang the folk melodies that I heard in the friendly Birmingham taverns and beautiful celtic songs that had so poingnant tales to tell. I had not lost my love of music. One still May morning just as the sun was rising and long rays of sunshine forced their way through our bedroom windows, I heard the piano was playing one of my songs. I looked at my husband. I could see that he hear the music too. I wasn't my imagination.
We crept to the living-room and there was Kevin picking out the melody on the old piano. He was standing on the sofa in front of the piano. He could hardly reach the keys but there was no mistaking the pride he felt.
That was twelve years ago. Now we have a shining new Schimmel piano and Kevin is a competent jazz-pianist. He is only fourteen years old and he is going to be a pianist ... or a pilot ..or .... who knows what?
I often wonder if I could have been as good a pianist as he is............
The Gold Toilet
A few weeks ago an old friend from America came to visit me here in Sweden. We hadn't seen each other for many years. She had got married in the mean time and we had lots to talk about so time just flew away.
She now had five children, four boys and a baby girl, but she only had the two youngest children with her. The little boy played with his toys and the little girl slept peacefully in her pram.
When the little girl woke up and started to cry, my friend said it was time to feed her and change her nappy - or diaper as she called it.
Suddenly she remembered that her little boy could not open the door to the bathroom.
-Do you need to go to the bathroom? she asked.
-Oh, no, he replied, I've already been.
- Have you really? said Cindy-Loo. You are a clever little boy.Have you already learned how to open the bathroom door? she asked, in a surprised but delighted voice.
-No, mommy, he replied. I used the gold toilet.
-We don't have a gold toilet!, I exclaimed.
- Yes, you do! he insisted. There it is!
The little boy pointed innocently to my trombone, which I had placed in a corner of the room, far out of harm's way, or so I thought.