On Mom's Piano

She would've been 60 today--or she is 60, depending on your attitude towards the afterlife--or she is outside all age and time now, depending on your thinking towards pre-mortality and eternity.

In any case, she would've been closer to the age when it no longer feels too soon, when it wouldn't have felt quite so strange to be taken from us.

She's been on my mind on this birthday more than others, because I no longer have her piano.  Oh, it's still technically mine, make no mistake, but it is no longer in my possession.  I'm moving out east this Fall to start a PhD you see; and rather than burden myself with the expense of carrying it across multiple states, I've left it in trust of family--specifically a 2nd cousin in Orem--with a vague promise to retrieve it one day at some unspecified and distant date, like some sort of lesser samaritan.

I'm trying to embrace my inner-Thoreau a little, by shedding most the worldly possessions that already encumber me, to start out fresh in some new wilderness.  My goal is to only travel with--and be content with--whatever can fit in the back of an ol' 4-door sedan.  It generally feels good to make myself less materialistic...but Mom's piano complicates that feeling.  The piano is Mom's, you understand?  Putting aside the fact that I'll never get another free piano again, that particular piano belonged to my dead-and-buried Mother, and there is more than just sentimental value there.

It's the piano where I first learned to play piano; it's where she played piano; we occupy the same place in space but not in time (if there even is such a thing as time) when I play it.  To sell off or even just give away this piano would feel not just callous, not just disrespectful or even disloyal, but sacrilegious.  This thudding, heavy, full-half-step-flat-out-of-tune instrument is in all senses my most direct connection back to her.

But here now comes the paradox, the unresolved tension, my complex relationship with Mom's piano, because it is also Exhibit A in my life of how the things you own begin to own you.  To review: Dad sent it down to me 4 years ago without asking me for permission, after his then-recent remarriage saddled him with 2 pianos.  I begrudgingly accepted it, though soon grew to appreciate--nay, love--that I could now practice whenever I wanted.  In fact, I now had the resources to learn new songs, which I did, it was marvelous!

Then I graduated.  A fellow grad student, knowing I'm from Washington, asked me casually if there was anything to keep me in Utah now that I'd completed my MA.  For a brief, wild, flashing moment, my eyes opened wide, as I considered that hey, yeah!  I could give away my sparse furniture to DI, load up the back of my car and drive off into the great unknown, like I used to in college!  I could move to California, or Portland, or maybe New York--maybe I should teach English in China again!--or maybe Mexico this time?--or maybe work in Europe or Australia or anywhere, everywhere--

But then my musings stopped suddenly, as I remembered, no, wait, I can't move anywhere!  I own a PIANO!  And not just any piano, MOM'S piano!  I must take that heavy beast into all future considerations.  And I stayed put in Utah.

Oh, I still got some traveling done--but each time I travel abroad, I'm reminded again and again of how few worldly possessions a man really needs--in fact, I realize how much more free a man is when he's free of things.

So, I guess that's the real question: do I want to be free of my Mom?  Could I even be free of Mom?  What does that even mean?  Would leaving behind the piano even free me?  Surely she will always be with me if you believe that sort of thing (and I do) no matter what happens to that piano; but music was so central to both her identity and mine that it becomes difficult to disassociate her from the piano.

Is the piano holding me back?  But here is another deeply distressing paradox: that piano also moves me forward!  I learn new songs on it, I develop my talents, I give full expression to the passions and madness of my soul, I enter the spaces beyond words and commune with the infinite on that decidedly-finite piano.  What weighs me down also lifts me up.  My bondage is my freedom.  My fall is my exhalation.  My roots are my branches.  What keeps me grounded (and trapped?) also liberates and opens me.  Can you tell I'm still conflicted?

Of course, all this agonizing is strictly academic, the question of the piano is a fait accompli--it's in Orem now, with family.  But the paradox has only deepened, because the piano is now mine but isn't, I'm free of it but am not.

These anti-pack-rat tendencies come from my Dad I think; that trait is something of his that weighs down in me--and that quite literally, because his anti-hoarding is what sent that piano down to me in the first place.  But lately I've been wondering if we've worked so hard to not be hoarders, to push back against materialist attachment, that perhaps we've overcompensated in the other direction.  For here is another paradox I believe in but have yet to resolve: we are to seek not after the things of this world, for behold, ye cannot carry it with you; nevertheless the meek shall inherit not some ethereal plain of pure abstraction, no--the meek shall inherit the Earth.

We are to be free of this world.  We are also to possess it.  We are to lose all but we are also to gain all we've lost back.  I think I am to have the same relationship with Mom's Piano.