the time of our singing excerpt
She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. "I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you're... while you aren't..."
She couldn't have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn't tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only forty-four keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing's action was like a screen door that wouldn't close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concerts halls Jonah and I had once played. As I look at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We'd all die of unreturnable kindness. Misplaced love supreme.
"It's wonderful. I can't believe it. You shouldn't have. I don't deserve this. We have to send it back." A look came over her like I'd killed her dog. "Of course we'll keep it. Come on. Let's sing." Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into "Honeysuckle Rose." All she'd hoped for. I could do that much.
The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.
--joseph strom, the time of our singing
She couldn't have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn't tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only forty-four keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing's action was like a screen door that wouldn't close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concerts halls Jonah and I had once played. As I look at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We'd all die of unreturnable kindness. Misplaced love supreme.
"It's wonderful. I can't believe it. You shouldn't have. I don't deserve this. We have to send it back." A look came over her like I'd killed her dog. "Of course we'll keep it. Come on. Let's sing." Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into "Honeysuckle Rose." All she'd hoped for. I could do that much.
The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.
--joseph strom, the time of our singing
posted by self_invasion | 1:00 PM
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