Did my Aunt Florence and Uncle Joe have a Buddha in their hallway?
A chubby statue drifts into my thoughts as if from a dream, smiling through squinting eyes. It seems an important detail, to know if this mystical figure entered my life at such an early age. The inadequacy of my memory to recall this with certainty vexes me tonight.
My aunt and uncle’s house in Queens most definitely had a backyard, which is why we had so many family gatherings there. And there was definitely a piano in their basement.
I remember playing it because there weren’t a lot of other things to do. Apparently a song came on the radio and I walked over and picked it out note-for-note. Maybe I was four. My parents looked at each other.
“We need to get this kid lessons.”
There was a Yamaha School in Queens. I went two or three times. I can’t remember what I learned, but I think I liked it.
We moved from Queens to Kingston in 1972. That same year, in the middle of dinner, a truck pulled up to our front porch and delivered an ancient upright that my dad had just purchased for $100. It was the happiest I’d ever seen him.
My sister and I were addicted to Abbot and Costello at 11:30am on Sunday mornings. That’s where we first heard the Andrews Sisters, who inspired me to figure out eight-to-the-bar. That I remember clearly.
Our friend Judy gave me a few lessons on the baby grand in the living room of their nice house up on Pearl Street. Next came Mrs. Pauker, also on Pearl Street. Those lessons were more structured, but boring, they didn’t last.
Finally, our neighbor Jayne across the street started taking lessons from a teacher named Allen. Not sure he was a perfect match for Jayne, but he was a better match for me.
My mom called him a bohemian. Every Wednesday afternoon, as he walked across Warren Street from the McCloskey’s house to ours, he’d put his earring back in.
One thing I liked was that he had me reading real music and playing with both hands almost immediately. I felt like I was really playing, not just dicking around.
I still had this stubborn propensity to play by ear. One day, Allen covered the sheet music with his hand. I smiled sheepishly as I continued to play without looking at the notes.
He gave me a look. Okay, Mister Smart Guy.
Next week he showed up with Bartók, a whole book of it. You can’t fake that shit. There was no way for me to play without looking at the sheet music, but it made no sense to my ear. Years later I came to like Bartók, but then I hated it.
Anyway, Allen said I needed a better piano. My mom found one in the paper for $200, which was twice the price of the first piano. On our way to New Paltz to have a look, Mom and I looked at each other and said at the same time, “What if it’s yellow?”
We got to the house. It was yellow. I’m not making this up. It was inexplicable. We had to buy it.
It was only after we got it home that our piano tuner, Mr. Pato, informed us that the soundboard couldn’t hold a proper tuning. He tuned the entire piano down a half step, which in turn tuned my ear down a half step. Consequences.
I progressed rapidly nonetheless. Allen had gone to Juilliard, he thought if I stuck with it, maybe I could go to Juilliard, too.
I never did any recitals, but one time, when I accompanied the chorus at J. Watson Bailey, Allen came to see me perform. Afterwards on our way back to the car, he commented aloud, just to mess with the squares,
“Nice job, let’s go get high.”
The parents leaving the auditorium almost dropped their teeth.
This was junior high. Maybe I didn’t actually smoke joints with my piano teacher, but I smoked joints with a lot of other people. Which is likely the simplest explanation why I quit piano lessons not long afterwards.
I didn’t stop playing. If anything, once it wasn’t considered practice, I actually played more. Pop stuff I heard on the radio. Later came imported stuff from the UK, once I started to figure out what I liked. It was a way to hide in plain sight in a small house, but I threw myself into it like I was preparing myself for something, though I didn’t know what.
I knew Allen had been disappointed in me. He thought if I’d taken my studies seriously I had a chance to be a classical pianist. In recent years, attempting to teach myself Bach and Schubert, I see the innate superiority compared with a lot of the stuff I’ve monkeyed with over the years.
The questions resurface occasionally. If our piano had been in better tune, would I have perfect pitch? If I’d kept up with my studies, could I have been a classical musician?
But it’s not these questions that haunt me tonight. It’s Did my Aunt Florence and Uncle Joe have that Buddha statue in their hallway or not?
Then I realize, the issue is not so much that my memory is failing me in this particular instance.
It’s that there’s no one left who I can ask.
That’s the thing that just doesn’t make sense.
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Yes I know that feeling. Sometimes all four of us siblings will ask if anyone remembers what xyz was about.
Lovely