The Green Wave

My father would be 68 today were he alive. He didn’t have much to do with music or fostering music in me for many years, but in recent years it was a special point of pride and pleasure for me that he liked my singing. In fact, it is far more than that. One night, when the battering ram of chemotherapy was just beginning its awful work, I phoned him just to make contact, to hear his voice. I told him that I was heading to an open mike and that I didn’t know what to sing. (The truth is, I was terrified for him and didn’t know what to do). He answered me breezily, jauntily, “What do you care, Kate? You sing like a friggin’ bird!” This compliment is the most precious I have ever received, and I count it among my life’s treasures. Happy Birthday, Dada. May the seabirds of heaven sing the song of your heart’s desire.

When I was five years old, my mother brought me to the green Victorian house of Miss Ruth Olive Roberts, piano teacher of my grandmother, my mother and aunts, my older boy cousins, and finally, me. I had never seen such a great carved heavy door, nor an Oriental rug, nor a cuckoo rushing out with a shriek to herald the hour. I had never imagined a domed silver candy dish filled with lovely treats on the hall table, nor a candelabra giving off shadowy light. And I certainly had never imagined a life of music such as the one Miss Roberts lived.

My mother walked me into the music room where a black upright piano stood where it caught a breeze from the window. Nearby, Miss Robert’s little secretary desk was guarded by a portrait of Beethoven that I found all at once grim, inspiring, and funny. (He was the grumpy man at church you can’t help but like). Behind us, next to the fireplace, there was a pedal organ, its surface busy with sheet music. And through the open archway decorated with wheels and wooden spindles, one could just glimpse the corner of the grand piano, a ship I instantly wished to sail.

That first day, Miss Roberts sat and talked to me a little, and then she illustrated the ideal curve of the fingers on the keyboard by placing an egg in the overturned nest of my small hand. I remember marveling at this blasphemy – food near furniture! what if I pressed down?!- and thriling to the danger more than the lesson. My brother, with his slightly larger hands, had in his time found an apple inserted between his fingers and the keys, though I can’t imagine that the excitement of that could approach the egg.