What My Hands Forget

In a farmhouse, years ago, with living room curtains billowing, a couple flies dancing their nuisances’ waltz, I sat on a piano bench and experienced three of the greatest minutes of my life.

I don’t remember if I responded to an invitation to play or if the impulse simply struck me. I could not have been more than fourteen-years-old. At that point, I still attended my weekly piano lessons, and there was only one song that I enjoyed playing—Edelweiss, a famous song with a score easy enough for young fingers to perform.

On that day, one of my friends hosted a small dinner party consisting of a few of us girls from our church. We had all grown up together. I knew her family as well as most people know aunts or cousins.

I had never been to her house before that day, but I saw her family every week on Sunday, sometimes more often. Hers was a family of three girls and a boy. The family was famed in the area for their beef farm and butcher shop in town.

Starting in 1987, I took piano lessons for about a year. The idea to take the lessons had been my older brother’s. For the first couple of months, we attended each session together. One of our first lessons was how to find Middle C—the centering point. Whenever I got lost, I reoriented myself by finding Middle C.

My young life was turbulent at this time. My brother had tried to kill himself before the start of the new school year, and so, I continued the lessons by myself. In a way, piano lessons became my own refuge, my own therapy while he was hospitalized for months and my family struggled with the aftermath of his failed attempt.

Locating Middle C became a comfort. I “wrote” music—mostly lyrics. I wanted to be a singer/songwriter at that age more than anything. I scribbled poems on scrap paper, toyed with tunes on the piano and a slack string guitar, and lip-synched my favorite pop songs in front of my bedroom mirror. Music offered a respite from arguing parents and the emptiness of my brother’s room.

But, in that farmhouse, after spending dinner with a family full of bickering siblings, I found my way to the piano. My friend’s mother Nancy sat down in her chair with a satisfied sigh—the meal, a success; the dishes cleaned and ready for another day. Theirs was a musical family. The father and my friend would sing specials at church. My friend’s uncle and aunt also possessed musical talents and performed at our church and elsewhere.

But, I don’t remember Nancy ever singing special music. I had never heard her sing.

I tapped Middle C and firmed my wrists. I loved Edelweiss from The Sound of Music just for the beauty of its melody.

My fingertips sank the appropriate keys, and so began what would be the pinnacle of my musical career.

Mrs. Belleville tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and softly began to sing along—the lyrics louder as I hushed my playing and allowed her voice to gain strength.

I had never accompanied anyone before. Suddenly, nothing else seemed to exist but the music. My fingers did not halt or falter. My hands hopped from key to key, note to note, and for the first time, when I played, I did not use my fingers. They would’ve only gotten in my way. I let go, closed my own eyes and let the raw energy of this impromptu moment fill us both. I have never heard anyone sing more beautifully, and if I have, I would not recognize it. Someone sang a song she loved, that I also loved, and the magic of that mutual appreciation felt connective. Together, in tandem, our memories overlapped, intersected, and resonated and struck each chord deep inside that piano box.

I had known her my entire life, but never until that Sunday afternoon did I see Mrs. Belleville from church so open and moved. Nancy was a good woman, a hearty Midwestern woman from strong stock, who definitely could scold when needed, but in that living room was a softer side. She would pass away some years later, yet another young life lost to cancer. And, I will never forget her or that day.

I’ve lost many things over the years—people I love, people I don’t, friends, trinkets—but one thing I continually lament is that I lost the ability to play the piano. I stopped lessons not long after that day, focused my attention on other things, writing mostly, and soon Edelweiss withered inside me, my fingers no longer able to find the notes.  What my hands forget, though, my heart remembers.

I can still locate Middle C. That much I have kept, along with the memory of playing a tune in a farmhouse on the outskirts of a small Midwestern town. Not Carnegie Hall or Broadway or somewhere with my name in lights. No applause—just a lull of silence after that last note—a heart beat, or two—before we looked at each other and smiled.

Dreams do come true, not as large or grand as my childish imagination might’ve hoped, but, twenty years later, on a snowy afternoon in February, I remember this moment and realize that it was enough for me.