Music Lessons

boy with guitar walking by, Mrs. Haley, Larry the Lounge Lizard

Once a week, a young man walks by with his guitar strapped to his back. The music school is down the street. Who knows if he’ll still be playing the guitar 50 years from now? Doesn’t matter. He will have the memory of having played, having learned something he didn’t know before.

Oh, the things we pick up along the way, not knowing what will disappear, what will stick, what will form a foundation for future curiosities.

I got my first guitar when I was 12 - a Harmony Classic guitar (used), just like my older sister Sheila. I never took lessons. Didn’t have to. Sheila taught me everything she knew. I bet I was the only kid in seventh grade playing a bluesy Scotch and Soda, When Sunny Gets Blue. She introduced me to Nina Simone, Odetta. My mother thought we were all going to the dogs. I went through The Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Rush. ‘Goin’ downtown with my hat in my hand, lookin’ for a woman ain’t got no man…’

la guitariste, sullyarts

Music was central to our growing up. But the guitar didn’t count. It was all about the piano.

I started a memoir about 25 years ago. Maybe I’ll finish it someday. I wrote about many things, including piano lessons.

PIANO LESSONS

The only other thing that made any difference to Ma was piano lessons.  We had a big old Henry F. Miller grand piano in the living room and it was like planes circling La Guardia, waiting for a slot to practice the piano.  My mother knew all the pieces we were practicing and she'd call from the kitchen where she was peeling enough potatoes to pave the driveway, "No, that's a G# there!"

Yeah, thanks, Ma.  How the hell did she know that anyway?  She wasn't quite as bad, though, as my Aunt Joan, my mother's  organ- playing-nun-of-a-younger-sister, who could sing you any note you wanted, right out of the goddamn air.  Yeah, but I guess she had more time to practice, just hanging around a convent all day.  You know, she could just sit in her little cubicle with her pitch pipe (nuns always had pitch pipes) and drill and drill until she got it right.  So, it's no fair comparing, really.  And she was nice about it, I suppose.  She never bragged about it or anything.  She probably wanted to, but bragging wasn't allowed for nuns.  So she kept pretty quiet about it.  Not that we had to worry about it all that much.  I probably saw her once every ten years--so, once, before I went to college.  I guess I just heard  a lot about Aunt Joan's Perfect Pitch.

The rest of us slogged along through piano lessons with Mrs. Haley. There was a period there we must have been her sole means of support.  Mrs. Haley was an elderly women with glasses on a string and a Boston Terrier named Jerry and a house that smelled of old upholstery and stale coffee.  Just the smell walking in used to depress me, knowing that I hadn't practiced, hadn't read the chapter on Mozart, hadn’t pasted the numbered sticker-illustrations in the proper dotted-line locations . 

‘Who'd like to go first?’, chirps Mrs. Haley. That was a tough one.  Did you want to get it over with so you could sit in the waiting room afterwards and be all relaxed and make faces when Mrs. Haley wasn't looking?  Or did you really  need the time to read about Mozart so you wouldn't make a fool of yourself?  And while you were thinking about all this, your older sister volunteered you, so it wasn't worth having spent all that energy trying to decide.  Then, the most you could hope for was that Jerry's ball would get lost under the credenza and he wouldn't stop yapping until we all dug under there with a yard stick to find the ball.  Of course, Old Mrs. Haley couldn't get down on her hands and knees to find the ball herself, so she was always very grateful that we were there to help her.  I used to drag out that ball-fetching as long as I possibly could.  I'd be down there on my hands and knees, acting  like I couldn't quite catch sight of it, then straining, reaching under with the yard stick, my face twisted up towards Mrs. Haley's so she'd be sure to know how hard I was trying.  Finally, I'd sense that I was on the verge of overdoing it and flick the ball out for the little mutt.  Another good interruption was giving Mrs. Haley the check for the lessons.  That was only once a month, but it was usually good for five minutes while Mrs. Haley rhapsodized about how wonderful my mother was and how prompt she was with her payment.  I loved it when Mrs. Haley rhapsodized.  You knew you were in for a good five to eight minutes.  Especially when she got going on The Eastern Star, which obviously was some kind of club for older piano teacher ladies. They would have Functions, where all the ladies dressed up and talked about how nice it was to be in The Eastern Star.  Mrs. Haley used to play the piano at these functions, or so she said, but this always surprised me because I could never picture Mrs. Haley actually playing the piano.  I could only picture her talking  about playing the piano. She hardly ever put her fingers on the keys.  She did occasionally, when she wanted to show you about how to rotate the elbows around, around  while you're playing--to get emotion.  Then she'd take your elbow and make it go around, around  while you tried to play Für Elise at the same time.   All it did was make you play all the wrong notes but she'd get a little annoyed and say the notes weren't what mattered at that moment. I kind of wished they didn't seem to matter so much at all the other moments. There was a slight edge to the whole thing.  It kind of reminded me of when my father cleaned my toenails. (see previous chapter) You could also count on, every other lesson or so, her leaning over you to turn a page or something, then looking at her upper arms and getting all upset at how flabby they were. 

I didn't mind too much that they were so flabby--only when they were in my face.  I don't know why she just didn't wear outfits that had long sleeves so she wouldn't have to worry about all that flab.  All I can figure is that she must have really liked the dresses she picked out every morning. The other thing Mrs. Haley would do is take your hand in hers, which was kind of disgusting to begin with, and press her fat sausage-y, arthritic fingers with the thick, yellow, lined fingernails, onto the back of your hand to show how much pressure  to put on the keys.  I was never really thinking about the piano keys at those moments.  I always just wanted her to get her sausages off my hand so I could finish the lesson and get outside to get some fresh air.

I'm sure Mrs. Haley was sorry to see us go.  At the peak she had my sister  Sheila playing Clair de Lune;  Geddy, Bach's Gavotte in G Minor;  Tim, The Sky Patrol, one of those bogus little pieces they have for kids who can't quite hack the big boys. This was actually Tim's swan song.  He quit after Sky Patrol.  He was twelve, so my mother let him.  I think she thought about piano lessons kind of like nursing--if you'll just start them out on it, it will set them up for life.  I played March of the Toys.  Anne, the oldest, had already quit and Michael  hadn't started yet.  We all played the pieces we were sick to death of at a fancy recital at the Unitarian Church.  It was worth it just to see the inside of a pagan church.

the recital, sullyarts

That recital couldn't compare, though, with the one where I had to play Mendelssohn's Spinning Song.  It's presto and I had certain parts that I got going almost presto.  But the stakes were higher.  This was The New England Conservatory and there was a big audience and the grand piano was on an elevated stage. I just started in on old Mendelssohn, very presto-like. The trouble was, I really had no clue what I was playing and the whole thing was by rote so when I stumbled half way through, I was dead in the water.  No music.  No memory.  No fingers.  If I could have figured out how to just float, bench and all, gently up towards the ceiling and out an air vent, I  certainly would have. But instead, I was forced to start again and just hope to God I could get past the place I'd gotten stuck before. Apparently I  did, because I'm not still sitting there.

That was my last year of classical. I'd had it.  Mrs. Chin was entirely too serious and I just couldn't get as interested in those Bach inventions as she was.  And besides, we were in a little practice cubicle with no dogs or credenzas and The Conservatory just billed my mother.  She paid by mail.

After that, I took one year of popular. My mother was actually taking lessons with Larry and decided we all should.  There was definitely a group-think going on in our  house.  I think it just made things easier for Ma.  If we were all at Morse's  Pond, or all taking Latin, or all at the same college (I'm afraid it's true) at least she'd have kind of a handle on things and have a few minutes to herself for a game or two of solitaire.

 Larry taught Ma and me split tenths and crushes and walking bass lines and cluster chords.  He taught us how to play The Business Man’s Bounce, which just meant playing everything with that same easy swing tempo so all the men could bob around the dance floor and feel competent.  Larry taught us how to be lounge lizards.

         Larry, of course, was delighted.  He became a household fixture. Larry was an older man who wore a suit and tie all the time.  He looked like a piano salesman.  He always carried a buldging black brief case full of music.  He looked like a doctor making house calls. He came to the house to give his battery of lessons.  Something about the way Larry looked at me when we were practicing all those crush chords on the Henry F. Miller in the corner of our living room, very removed from where my mother was in the kitchen, probably stuffing a hen or something, made me a little squeamish.  I think he'd been a lounge lizard for too long.  I used to make him laugh.  After a while I stopped because he was enjoying it a little too much for my taste.  I mean, there's something really disgusting about an old man in a suit making eyes at you from underneath his wall-to-wall eyebrows. It's pathetic really.  Where was Mrs. Larry and I bet she didn't have any idea that her husband was out schmoozing his young piano students.

 I spent long enough with Larry to get a feel for all the music which had been forbidden by Mrs. Haley and The New England Conservatory.

 My mother hired Larry and his combo for my wedding and he sent me off to my married life with a rousing round of Business Man's Bounces.  If he was ogling me at my wedding, I didn't notice.  I didn't really notice much of anything at my wedding.  I don't think anybody  ever does.  I'm sure you want to know if I had any misgivings about getting married so young, if I had second thoughts about ramming college into three years so I could get married, if I truly understood what it all meant.  I'd like to tell you all that these thoughts were running through my head, that I was wrestling with all these issues.  But I'd be lying.  I was full of the infallibility and certainty of youth--especially a youth who had never been asked to cough up an original idea in her life.   My husband and I were also full of Cold Duck, which he later threw up in a little rented cabin in Nova Scotia.

I could give you all the things I've figured out now, but that's just Monday morning quarter-backing and this isn't the football chapter.

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Stay curious. Learning’ll keep us alive.