By Stacey Warde
Part I
My dad traded his used lawnmower for my first piano. I was in sixth grade.
We lived in the condos, Tustin Village, a tight mix of family units separated only by paper-thin walls through which, as children, we could listen to our neighbors’ pillow talk.
We had no need for a lawnmower.
All that grew in front of our condo, along the concrete slab for a walkway to our front door, was ugly green ivy, a great place for rodents to thrive. The few lawns that could be mowed were kept by the homeowners association in the finely manicured commons, “the putting greens,” we called them — located between two community swimming pools — where at night some of the Village kids would gather to smoke marijuana and pair up for sex for the first time.
Sometimes, we’d spend the day indoors, unsupervised, listening to early versions of Santana or Neil Young on a hi-fi stereo system that belonged to a friend’s parents.
In addition to hanging out in the putting greens and the swimming pools, we gravitated to the playground with its half-court basketball space, swings and tether ball court.
When we got bored with these activities, we’d gather in the greens to play, throw rocks and clods at the beehives hanging from a smattering of olive trees around the commons. Once, a beehive came crashing down on Lane as he rode his bicycle beneath the hive when a rock dislodged it from its place in the tree. He tore off on his bicycle toward home, screaming, covered with bees. His parents rushed him to the hospital. No one that I knew at the time had a love for playing a musical instrument.
The only public music on site occurred occasionally when someone in the Village hosted a cocktail party in the clubhouse, where kids weren’t allowed to loiter.
Prior to moving to the condos, we lived in a small rental house with a tiny lawn that needed frequent quick mowing. Since moving to the Village, however, the mower sat unused in a shed in the square concrete slab of our condo “backyard,” no larger than a prison cell with high fencing, a place that felt mostly like a developer’s afterthought, an accident or a trap, no place where kids or parents would want to spend their time, unless they were hiding, in deep depression, seeking outdoor isolation, or cooking on the barbecue.
The only person in the condos who played a musical instrument in that festering pool of latchkey children, mostly pre-teens, looking for things to do, was an older, stout, and not very popular girl whose father worked for an electronic typewriter business. He, of course, was proud to inform us that his daughter could play the accordion quite well and would love to give us a concert. Kids in the neighborhood turned down the offer several times until finally we gave in and sat for a session in which the stout girl played her accordion with verve and acumen, while her proud, beaming father accompanied her on his own accordion. I don’t exactly remember the music, only the pleasure her face showed while she played. We let her play for us only that one time.
Not long after the home mini-concert, a few of us decided to pick up guitars, it didn’t matter what kind, plastic, wood, whatever, we were gonna play. Forget the accordion! We burned ourselves out the first day and our band aspirations died just as suddenly.
As a sixth-grader, I was discovering that girls had superpowers as we hung out on bored afternoons, listening to records, watching TV, feeling the itch of pubic hairs starting to grow, and sometimes curious hands rummaging through our pants. I needed and wanted more focus, something creative, something to fill in the hours when I wasn’t at the ballpark, or throwing oranges at cars from inside the surrounding orange groves, or lounging on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house while his sister tried to wrestle me off the couch.
Dad traded his mower for a beautiful clunky old upright piano that barely fit into our tiny three-bedroom condo. It took up nearly half the dining area downstairs but it fit snugly where it stood against the paper-thin wall. He traded it with my beloved great-aunt Doris, an avid gardener with a big beautiful home garden in Laguna Beach where she and her sister, my grandmother, grew up. She needed the lawnmower more than we did, and she would put it to good use. I loved visiting her home and her garden, which always felt like welcome spaces to me, mostly on account of her warmth and easy Southern California demeanor and the lovely roses in her garden.
I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.
Mrs. Boger, a classical pianist, had come to our school, the brand new Heideman Elementary School. She came to play music as part of a trio, and I was mesmerized. We sang songs in school with one of the teachers who enjoyed singing but we had never seen a live performance by real pros. I felt drawn to the mix of sound from stringed instruments harmonizing with Mrs. Boger’s piano playing.
The mini-concert was my first real awakening to live music. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring music into the school but I’m glad that it happened; it’s been a lifelong journey and enjoyment in the more than 50 years since. Music, as I understood it until Mrs. Boger came along, had mostly been sing-alongs at school or took place in the background, usually while listening to my Uncle Ron’s vinyl selection of soul, which I still love. But music wasn’t something I’d ever experienced up close, not in a personal or intimate way, not where you could actually see and hear the musicians playing, working together to create harmony.
No one in my family, as far as I knew, had ever played a musical instrument. Only much later did I learn that my grandma played the piano when she sat down one evening and started playing from some old sheet music we had in the house. Her mother, a pioneer educator, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing, sometimes embarrassing mom and her siblings in a Laguna Beach church because she sang louder than everyone else.
None of that came down to me until dad traded his lawnmower.
I marveled at this music in the flesh, Mrs. Boger and her trio, sound produced by perfectly imperfect humans keeping time and blending themselves in a mix of harmony that I found more compelling than lumbering through a bunch of reading cards, or trying to avoid falling asleep at my desk during “self-directed” exercises such as reading and math. I hated penmanship too, especially when the teacher would try in vain to force my left-handed writing style to look more like a right-hander’s by twisting my hand back instead of letting it curl awkwardly around my pen as felt natural to me.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Boger’s hands, though, left and right, as they moved effortlessly across the keyboard, producing the most amazing, articulate sound, in a language or vocabulary that felt both familiar and foreign, in time and in sync with these other musicians. When the performance was over I ran up to the piano. How long does it take to learn how to play like that? What was she reading? Sheet music? What’s that? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. She asked me if I would like to learn how to play the piano.
Yes! I told her. She reached into her purse and gave me her business card. “Give this to your parents,” she said. “Tell them you want to take piano lessons.”
Stacey Warde writes and practices the piano daily from his home in Mendocino County. This article first appeared on Medium.
