"So have you played the piano already?" Janice asked me. "You know it's still in the living room." Janice was the one who had the itchy fingers and always wanted to finger a keyboard. In an old photo album, I see my sisters sitting down to read, and Janice is sitting down at her toy piano. She was also the one, after she was grown, who once got a large piece of brown paper, drew lines on it with black magic marker; laid it on top of something on the floor and sat next to it to "play" it until Daddy got the message and bought her a used keyboard.
The first house we lived in was much too small, but as soon as we moved, we got a piano, and Mommy taught us the beauty of music. I can't imagine life without music. I'm sure Mommy had a lot to do with that. She got all three of her girls taking piano lessons, telling us we could use it for the Lord. Our school had a strong athletic department but had pretty much nothing when it came to music. Mommy's enthusiasm was about the only encouragement we got from the music education side.
I think it took Mommy more self-discipline to keep us on the piano than it took for us to keep at it. There were times we all wanted to quit. But Mommy always said, "If I let you quit now, some day down the road, you're going to look at me and say, 'Mommy, why'd you let me quit?' You really want me to let you quit?" We didn't when she put it that way. In fact, Joyce went on to major in music education in college (well, it was a double major, because she did math ed too).
Altho' I helped the missionary pianist in Fukushima-ken before the 2011 earthquake and practiced my piano as soon as we moved down to Iwatsuki after that, for various reasons, I have been away from the piano since 2017. When Janice asked if I'd played the piano, I realized I was almost afraid to say I'd try to play again--I wasn't sure how much my fingers would move.
It was as if the piano "heard" my misgivings and drew attention to how lackluster it had gotten, how it was slightly out of tune and sounded tinny now anyway. I didn't have to be able to perform on an advanced level; it wouldn't be able to produce the sound to match. So...I began plinking away, and before I realized it, I'd been sitting at the piano several hours. Chords and octaves were coming out of my fingers, and my fingers began finding accompanying minors, crossovers. I am still nowhere near what I would call "free", but I surprised myself with how I was able to ENJOY.
Thank you, God, for giving me a Mommy who wouldn't let us quit.
