The Piano

The piano has been around longer than I have. It belonged to my grandmother, then my mother, then me. I remember playing it with my dad, and sitting next to him while he played. He didn’t know how to read music, but he had a good ear, and though he knew bits and pieces of many songs I recall three he and I would sing together while he played. Pennies from Heaven, I Wish You Love and Moonlight in Vermont were our songs. I can’t recall when we stopped singing together, it just sort of happened.

Getting the piano from my mother’s house in Massachusetts to mine in Philadelphia was a bit of an ordeal, but when it finally arrived the feelings it stirred up weren’t the sweet, nostalgic ones I had expected. For the first few days it was there I avoided it. I had wanted it, I’d been so happy when my mother told me it was to come to me, and now it was like a menace. As much as I avoided the piano, I was avoiding my feelings about it and the root of them even more.

Those feelings were like a sore tooth I couldn’t keep my tongue from probing. I felt bad, and I couldn’t leave it alone. I’m not sure how long it took, but it couldn’t have been more than a few days for the memories to creep into my awareness. Gradually I remembered the hours I’d spent hiding under that piano, waiting for someone, anyone to come looking for me. No one ever did. Hiding is a funny occupation and a poor strategy for a child desperate for attention.

I don’t know that I can recall any specific events that sent me there, but I can still feel myself sheltering under it, nursing my hurts and feeding my loneliness. I hid there much longer than I should have, and I don’t mean at one time, rather I continued to use it as a retreat into my early teens. As I got older I found other ways to hide, and to get attention, but it was those moments waiting in the dark living room waiting that were haunting me now that the piano was in my living room.

Shame doesn’t fare well in the light. It is in dark corners, under pianos and in the hidden places in our minds that it flourishes and thrives. Was my longing for attention shameful? It felt that way, it felt like it was my fault; my loneliness, my fears, my needs were disgraceful and like me should be hidden. I believed it would take someone coming to find me to break the spell, and free me from these awful feelings. I waited and hoped, and somehow all those yearnings clung to that piano for all those years, waiting for me.

Finally, I was ready and able to face my shame, to bring it into the light and to free myself and my beloved piano. I had survived my sadness and my childhood and now, as an adult, as a parent, a friend, a sister I had all I needed to face the truth and to go find that little girl and offer her my hand to pull her out from under that piano.