The Gift of a Lifetime
Let’s be honest. There are gifts and then there are Gifts. And every once in a while, maybe once in a lifetime, along comes a GIFT that’s so breathtaking you can’t stop talking about it.
I haven’t yet and I don’t think I will anytime soon.
Come back with me to fall, maybe ten years or so ago. I was sitting in my office, just like I do any other day. It was gray and raw, just like it is every November. The phone rang, just like it always does. It was my cousin Maurice.
Those of you who come from big families -- my grandmother had 21 kids! -- understand when I tell you that I don’t recall ever talking to Maurice on the phone before.
First there was hello and how are you doing and haven’t seen you in a while and how’s the family and the weather’s been lousy hasn’t it and then, like a shot out of the blue came this: “I was wondering if you wanted the piano.”
For a moment, I just sat there at my desk, holding the phone closer to my ear to be sure of what I had heard and when it all finally began to sink in I tried to answer him. But no words would come.
“I was wondering if you wanted the piano.”
This was not: I was wondering if you wanted A piano. Or I was wondering if you wanted ANY piano. This could only be THE piano.
THE piano, I knew, referred to the Chickering Baby Grand that had once upon a time belonged to my Uncle Jean, a professional pianist who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. It belonged to him because his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, who all played instruments and loved to get together to make music, chipped in and bought it for him. It was during the Depression when money was scarce and yet they found a way to do it because the upright my Uncle Jean had practiced on for eight hours a day was no longer up to the task.
It’s a long and rambling story, as so many of them are when large families are involved. Let’s just say that when my uncle died, the piano was passed along to aunts and then to cousins and eventually wound up in storage in Westport while Maurice was renovating his house. Somewhere along the way, his brother, David, mentioned that I played the piano and my daughter played and, well, in the end, I guess Maurice just decided that a piano is meant to be played.
“I was wondering if you wanted the piano.”
So it came out of storage and went into restoration and was finally delivered to our house at the end of the summer. After the movers left, it just seemed to sit there all polished and proud, an imposing figure in our living room, inviting me in like a stranger that you know you’ve somehow met before.
But it wasn’t until during the holidays, with my parents and my sister and my uncle and my aunt and my cousins, Maurice and David, gathered around the piano that I knew the grand instrument had really found a new home.
And sometimes still when I sit there on that bench practicing by myself, I know that, strange as it may seem, I’m not alone. For there’s a family out there that helped me to grow up with a love of music. And perhaps, that’s the greatest gift of all.
Photo by Clark Young
