I was fired from piano lessons at age 7.  I may not have been a gifted pianist, but I was compared (unfavorably) to my older sister, who was 10 and clearly had more talent.  The piano teacher felt it was wasteful for my parents to spend money on piano lessons for me.  This would not prove to be my last rejection, but it was one that hit me in the heart.

And so several decades later, when we moved to Maplewood, I set about buying a piano, because we had room for one, and because I wanted to play one.  I went to the Lincoln Center sale in New York City, and I chose a beautiful black Kawai piano, not only did it sound gorgeous, but there was a red stripe against the black wood, just behind the white keys, a very thin red stripe, which pleased me enormously.  That may not have been the best reason to purchase the piano, but I am a visual person, and I just loved the way that piano looked.  And I started lessons again.  I’d like to say that I became a glorious player, but that would be fiction, and this blog is real.

But . . . the wonderful piano with the red stripe is played everyday now!  And it is very happy.  My two daughters, one fourteen and one ten, have been playing for years . . . and the music that fills our house is out of this world.  In part, I have my husband to thank—because he was a stay-at-home dad for seven years, and instead of keeping the house clean and tidy, he taught himself seven musical instruments, including piano, and he practiced with our girls every day.  (Among his other instruments are ukulele, which you can even take to the beach, piccolo, mandolin, accordion, guitar, and violin.)  His love of music became part of the house, and it’s no surprise that the girls fell in love with music too.

And our teacher, Pam Viscardo, who has been coming to play piano with us for six years, played a major role.  Pam says that children are what we tell them they are, and she has always told the girls how fabulously they play.  And they do.

khachaturian

It’s enough for me to hear the joy of the piano—once in a great while I play a few songs, but knowing how much that big triumphant percussion instrument has given my family makes me incredibly happy.  My red-striped friend, who sits in the living room, has a generous spirit, and I adore her.  The video above features one of my daughters, making a piano stand up and walk!  Sometimes, when met with rejection, we overcome it by watching  someone we love succeed.  That’s more than the case with my two pianists (well, three, actually, including my husband).

PLAY ON!

My dad grew up on a dairy farm—I wasn’t very old before that farm in Millerton, NY was sold—my grandparents had worked very hard and been careful with their money, and it was time for them to enjoy an easier way of life.

Each year, my family gives me a big gift–a week all by myself to think and write, and sit with my imagination, in the quiet of my house.  That’s what I am doing now, as I write this, but I am also “taking care of the farm.”  That’s what my ten year old calls our place.

~There’s the lizards, for starters, Speedy and Midnight.  They belong to my eight-year-old son.  They only eat live food—that’s right—things that are alive and in motion!  I was told by my family to check the homemade cricket traps they had rigged up.  I was more than a little bit nervous, because crickets jump high and fast and are unpredictable in their movements.  But nevertheless, I went outside to check the “trap.”  It consisted of one two-liter plastic bottle nestled inside another, each cut straight around the middle.  There was the lure of a baby carrot in the trap, the idea being that the crickets would want the carrot, and they would crawl through one bottle and get trapped inside the top of the other bottle, which still had the cap on.  To my horror I found four crickets trapped in there, jumping around.  Not wanting to let my family down, I carried the trap to my son’s room, holding it as far away from my body as possible.  I unscrewed the bottle cap, and the crickets descended into the lizard tank, and were quickly hunted down.  It was primitive, and it was glorious.  I was so impressed by the creativity that went into the trap, pictured here, and by the fact that it actually worked!  There’s something in the faces of those two geckos—I’m really smitten.

~Then there’s the plant watering:  This involved dipping the large watering can into the rain barrel, which was discovered at the dump.  There are goldfish in the rain barrel too, which eat the mosquito larvae, and it’s such an efficient system.  Kudes to my husband for this invention too—here’s a link in case you want to make your own.

~Then there’s the compost, a homemade machine that really works.  I dumped all the vegetable waste in there.

~And last is the pond the kids dug in the backyard, as big as the holes in Louis Sachar’s HOLES (which is one of my favorite books), full of Koi and goldfish.  There are also some pollywogs and snails we caught up at the nearby reservation.  They dug during the day while I went to work in the city, and I didn’t appreciate its beauty till I was left in charge.  I love feeding those fish.

I can see why my daughter calls it “the farm,” though I’m sure my grandparents and parents would laugh at that term for our little patch of land fifteen miles west of the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan.  But it is very much a farm, and everything they’ve created is from scratch.  So I tip my hat to my grandparents, who are no longer with us, and I tip my hat to my family too—I’m sorry not to have noticed what you’ve made before now, but I’m so pleased to be its caretaker until you return.

When we moved to our house in New Jersey nine years ago I was very sad to leave New York. But come spring, I couldn’t wait to see what color flowers the trees in our yard would have.

And then one by one, each tree bloomed white.

But I really wanted purple flowers.

On a trip to Home Depot, I bought a little tree, because it had a tag on it that said “plum tree.” I thought a “plum tree” would have purple flowers, and $12.98 seemed like a bargain for purple flowers.

A few years later it bloomed…with white flowers.

I didn’t know that a plum tree could have white flowers.

But a month or so later, I was walking home when I saw little green olives all over my tree. I wondered what they were. And as the weeks went by, I found out–I had a red plum tree!

I believe in the magic of this world.