This Easter, Eamon and I spent a lovely long weekend in the sylvan setting of the Daly estate -- this being the fabulous house Eamon's folks built in Fox Lake. It's on a lake, surrounded by foliage, wildlife, and so forth. Quite stunning.
Eamon was tending to the computer duties (upgrading his folks' computer's operating system), so I had a bit of time to myself. And Eamon's mother has a beautiful baby grand piano, set just in front of an expansive window overlooking the lake. So clearly, I had to try to play.
Dear friends, I am no piano whiz bang. I played a little piano from age 11 to age 15. The journey started at the local parks rec with a program involving lots of chords, and ended when I discovered my piano teacher also taught voice. I've barely sat down to the keyboard since, except to run vocal scales, prepare for musical theater auditions, and butcher the opening of "Under the Bamboo Tree" in a student production of Meet Me In St. Louis at Northwestern University.
Still, I like to try to plink out a tune or two every now and again, and it's always fun to see what riffs stick in my head, and what chords are utterly outside of my realm of recollection. Luckily, Eamon's mother, Helena, has a whole library of music books -- including lots of showtunes -- and more than a few are familiar to me. There are even some that were -- gasp! -- once part of my repertoire.
So as you can imagine, it was quite a little trip down memory lane to tinkle the ivories this past weekend. And it was nice to see that when my pathetic sightreading skills totally failed me -- which was frequently -- I still remembered my chords well enough to lean heavily on the accompanying notation to improvise the left hand. Using this dubious method, I plowed through "Edelweiss," "Try to remember," "Someone to Watch Over Me," and other such goodies.
And then a wondrous thing happened. I picked up "Maria" from West Side Story. And played through it, surprisingly well. And then "Somewhere." And then "One Hand, One Heart." I can't claim they were perfect, but they were oddly polished.
The reason?
Dear friends, I was once a 14-year-old girl. And like any 14-year-old girl, I knew that only I could understand the unbearable, unimaginable pain of perfect love thwarted. Playing these songs wasn't practice. It was like a holy act of worship. A deep expression of all that was profoundly meaningful.
And friends, when you've touched the very meaning of the human soul, you don't need chord charts. Not even 25 years later.
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