This is the last section of The Old Upright Piano, from Chapter 2 of The Immigrant and the Outlaw:

. . . When we got older, we began to complain about having to practice. Mom began to save the days’ dishes to bargain with—either practice the piano or do the dishes. We practiced. Mom happily did dishes while being serenaded by live music, often parking on the end of the piano bench—dishtowel in hand—singing along.

       That was, until my boogie woogie stage.

      Not the kind of music Mom had envisioned. About junior high age, I began to pound out W. C. Handy pieces: “Jogo Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”

       Over and over.

       An hour of Handy is a workout, physically and emotionally. And for mom, spiritually. She later admitted that my heavy-handed blues and boogie days drove her into her garden, where she “slew her dragons” as she slew weeds.

       But Mrs. Chapler put up with it gracefully. Of course, she only had to stand it for half an hour a week. She let me choose my recital pieces—from “Frankie and Johnny” my freshman year and “Shortnin’ Bread” the next, before I finally graduated to Chopin and Rachmaninoff.

       Years later, after marriage, after my husband’s years in the Air Force and Vietnam, we bought our first house. My folks gave us the wonderful old piano, but what a chore to get it from the Iowa farmhouse to a Denver suburb. Gloria made this sign for its move to Colorado: “Please Don’t Shoot the Piano Player—She’s Doing the Best She Can.”

       Here comes the bad episode.

       Five years and one son later, we moved back to Iowa. The heavy old gal had lost its two back wheels in the move, so it tilted back. My husband leaned his shoulder and head against the wall to pry the piano off so I could slip shims under it to replace the wheels.

       He ruptured a disc in his neck, leading to surgery to fuse a couple of vertebrae.

      But he recovered and decided that he still liked the piano well enough to take it apart, strip off the dark, grainy texture, and refinish it. It wasn’t long before son Dan was taking lessons and practicing on the same ponderous piano.

       She has an uncertain future. The last time the piano was tuned, we learned that she has a cracked sounding board, which cannot be mended. So the elegant instrument holds a silent corner in our main room, usually crowned with family pictures, those boogie woogie days just a remembrance.

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Our American Stories, July 28, 2021. (Lasts about 12 minutes.)

From The Immigrant and the Outlaw: A Collection of Stories from America’s Heartland. The first part of this story is here. 

If you enjoy audiobooks, The Immigrant and the Outlaw was done with Virtual Voice. It allowed me to tweak to get pronunciations corrected, but “she” could never quite pronounce “Rachmaninoff.” I gave up, deciding it was close enough, and that you’d probably get it anyway. If you’d like to listen to a clip, it’s right under the book cover. Just click “Virtual voice sample.”