I Love a Piano

My Mom wanted the both of us to learn to play the piano, as she and my Aunt Brenda had learned. My Grandparents had a beautiful old piano that my Great-Grandmother Swarthout once used on her farm in Allentown, NY. When we would visit, I remember trying to play that old out-of-tune piano and how beautiful it sounded to me. I don't recall what make of piano it was, but it had these wonderful ball and claw legs.

My parents purchased a used Baldwin piano for all of us to play. My Mom has always played beautifully and used to perform her recitals at the David A. Howe Library in Wellsville. At one point, she even attempted to teach me, but I don't think that I was her best student. My Dad learned to play from an old cruise ship pianist and he "plays by ear". He practices putting together different chords until he has something resembling a tune. Actually, he does this quite well and I love to hear him play Stardust. 


Tam started taking lessons around the first grade and quickly became very good. She had several teachers, but the most memorable for me was this young "hippie" woman who brought a music book with contemporary songs to play. When I started playing, I absolutely hated all of the exercises and scales I had to play. There was absolutely no chance that I was going to be a concert pianist and I just wanted to play something that I recognized. This "hippie" understood that and her legacy is the book with all of the Paul Simon and Norman Greenbaum songs in it.

My Mom tried to encourage me to keep learning the piano, because I would want to be able to play well someday. As I continued to grow, though, I lost interest in it. Of course, it didn't help that one of our numerous piano teachers dumped us. She told my Mom that she was getting out of the business, but curiously, she kept some of our friends as students. In any event, I never did learn to play well enough and I don't really play now. Someday, I hope to pick it up again.

After Tammie got a house of her own, she found an old player piano somewhere, and arranged to have it brought home. At the time, I thought that she had made a huge mistake, but she got it tuned and it didn't sound half bad. She started playing again and actually taught lessons for a while. I imagine that from time to time, she played some of the old tunes from the songbook that we  had used over and over again. I know for a fact that she had memorized at least one of them.