Saturday Memory for May 3, 2025
June
1
Saturday Memory
May 31, 2025
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, was one of my favorite books during my early teenage years, along with J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, both published in 1951, the year I turned 13. It was also the year that Citation became the first horse to win a million dollars. My dad and I were at the rail to see our favorite horse win. We danced and shouted. In those joyous moments, I became dimly aware that this was the end of my childhood. The was the year I also stopped playing the piano. My parents purchased that piano in 1945, before I was 7 years old. Tomorrow, June 1, 2025, and 80 years later, the movers will haul the piano to the recycler. Another kind of end of childhood.
Russ
I wish Henry had room for the piano in his studio. My childhood piano (a spinet) is in our basement, collecting dust. Henry got an upright from the 1920s for free in Olympia. It is 1/4 sawn oak, ornate, in good shape, so my childhood piano will be donated one of these days too. People do not read music any longer. There is no sheet music now of the latest popular songs, bought at the local music shop, once played on the piano in the parlor. The elite few who do read music are not playing for fun. They are pros. You don’t hear young children any longer playing from the JohnThompson piano books, the front doors to houses open and summer breezes wafting music throughout the neighborhoods.
At my recent high tea in March, everyone was asked to sing a song or read a poem or a story. Mark read the poem he wrote about me, which was set to music and recorded by Henry. We drank tea, ate finger sandwiches and stuffed ourselves on a chocolate cake I made. It felt as though we had turned back the clock to 1910, when this house was built. Your memory has inspired my own. And isn’t that the way it should be? So many memories of weekly formal high teas, when I was a student at University College London and singing Schubert Lieder, with skilled pianists, as my own contribution for the afternoon tea and my one meal of the day.
Wow! This post unearthed some deeply painful memories of my 13th year. Raped/pregnant as a result. Didn’t talk to anyone about it until pregnancy became apparent @ approx. 6-7 months. Mother and I moved out of town to SLC UT(medical condition requiring specialist). Moved from SLC to LA (a friend who made room available) because we had seen someone from hometown (Helper) … and it was that operative that no one know. Learned that it is imperative to always hide what is socially acceptable. Took a lot of labor to work myself out of that insanity. Like you, I had been given a piano by my parents (someone owed my father/a gambling debt which he exchanged for the piano). Took piano lessons from two elderly teachers whose strategy was ‘by the book.’ Still have a hard time improvising in life, though I parted ways with the piano … OMG Russ, sorry … but I had to share this eruption! Love you and BTW, your and Paco’s website it a genuine work of art. Love to you and share with Paco .,, the love that is. ~ Roberta
p.s.Didn’t mention that I was given a ‘saddle block’ and have no memory whatever of the child’s birth; I never saw the baby and was never told whether it was boy or girl. It was never spoken of in my family. Thirteen also marked the end of my attendance at Catholic School, appropriately and Thank God! Though there were obstacles to overcome, I was voted Vice President of Jr. High School the next year. Oh there’s more to this traumatic and dramatic chapter in my life.
Meanwhile, my dad was running an illegal Members Only nightclub, selling liquor over the bar, complete with crap table, slot machines. Wow, huh?
Chapter One in my autobiography will be titled “Introduction to Contradiction 101”
Oh Russ! Thanks for the Memories… and if I still had my old 2nd hand upright piano I’d play and sing it for you.
When I was 10 years old my Aunt Ruth, my father’s sister and a gifted pianist, gave me the money for my father to buy me an actual piano. She was touched that I only “played” the coffee table (but with gusto) pretending it to be a piano as I listened over and over again to my records of favorite composers Chopin, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, over and over again.
My father, on the advice of James, hired Euro Testi (honestly his name) as my piano teacher for he had recently hired Euro to teach Tommy. [and in the days before his death Tommy and I reminisced about these piano lessons among other youth-memories].
Euro was a task master and never gave me the pretty little tunes other friends with other teachers enjoyed playing but had me begin with Bach’s Sonatinas; one bar at a time, treble first and then bass, then all combined together, over and over until perfect, including hands and back held just so in perfect position. Continuing all in a bit by bit playing, until culminating in a whole shebang of a single sonatina after weeks and weeks of perfecting!
I never rebelled about this strictness for I believed in it and had fantasies of being a concert pianist. Nonetheless, because I loved so much to hear him play, I did rebel against his dictum to keep my nails short, knowing he’d angrily send me off each week to cut them. I had a method in this madness, for in this cutting done in another room he would play the piano himself as he waited for me. How sly of me and how sad, now that I think of it, that I feared to simply ask him play.
In fact! I now am recalling that I thought I was doing him a favor because he was a “tragic figure” of a musician who could not play at home because his landlord didn’t allow pianos. (this is true about the landlord…)
He and my father became friends — playing tennis — and I became the baby sitter for Euro’s two baby children. At this time I don’t remember when the lessons ended but do know this piano traveled with me, eventually to Santa Monica where each morning I would play the melodies I heard in my dreams, not trusting memory alone to recall the melody but having to play it out as I wrote down the notes.
Recently a piano was offered to me but no room no room no room and so I do rely on memory of dream melodies, usually with words. Singing a couple of them now!
Rivers of more memories come flowing along of those early piano years.
Again Russ, Thanks for the memories.