Piano Lessons from time past

Written by my aunt, Irene Vinyard Bennett, as a Christmas gift to the family in December 1997.

In her accompanying letter, she wrote,

This narrative version of the truth about our piano is my 1997 Christmas present to you.

It is fairly accurate, although I can’t remember exactly when the Osborns gave us the piano, but it was between 1953 and 1960.  Daddy built the “shack” in two weeks the summer I was 11 or 12, 1953 or ’54, and then he had the Jim Walter home built in 1960, the summer I graduated from high school and had eye surgery.  I don’t know why but I don’t remember moving the piano from one to the other house.

I don’t remember exactly when, or how I went about deciding to return the piano, except it was in 1968-69 when Phil and I first lived in Nashville.  Daddy died in November, 1969.

The Christmas timing made it a better story for the contest I first wrote it for.  Our local paper, the Augusta Chronicle, chose someone else’s work to publish on Christmas Eve, so I deleted most of the fiction and changed pretend names back to the real ones just for you, but I left the fictional Christmas reference.

               

PIANO LESSONS

“Whispering Hope,” the large group of post-World War II teenagers in Sunday School that day sang a cappella because the adult classes had asked the only two youth pianists, Ray Lee and Judy Osborn, to accompany them.

“That makes me SO mad,” Irene complained to her friend, Virginia Bailey.  “Why don’t the adults let them stay in here?  They don’t seem to realize that we need a pianist, too!”  A little while later, she said, “I think I’ll just teach myself to play, so we won’t have to sing without music anymore!”

“Oh, can you really do that?” Virginia asked.

“Watch me,” replied Irene.

Irene Vinyard lived in Hammond, a small town in southeastern Louisiana, with her parents, maternal grandmother, and five younger brothers and sisters.  Her father worked as a maintenance man for Southeastern Louisiana College on the north side of town, while Mama and Grandma cared for the children on the south side of Hammond, in their crowded, three-room home Daddy had built with salvaged lumber in 1953 during his two-week vacation.  They all affectionately called it the Tar Paper Shack because of its single-canted roof and black insulating paper-covered walls.  The paper was attached with roofing nails and shiny protective washers.  Somehow he never got around to finishing it with the siding common to the gabled-roof houses in the neighborhood.  Every Sunday they walked about two miles to the small Woodland Park Baptist Church for Bible study and worship.

At Sunday Dinner when Irene told the family about her idea, Mama frustrated her by saying, “We don’t have the money to pay for lessons, and we don’t have a piano for you to practice on.  I don’t see how you can learn to play.”

One Sunday afternoon Irene went to church early.  Discovering no one in the fellowship hall, she began with one finger to pick out the melody of a hymn on the piano.  Several years of school chorus classes had taught her to read music, and she already knew the tunes from singing in church services.  However, as soon as anyone entered the room, she stopped, self-conscious about her lack of skill.

Such a start-and-stop-and-start-and-stop method might appear to be quite ineffective.  But, week after week as she tried to play with one finger, then two fingers, improvement gradually came.

First, the soprano, then the alto, next the tenor and bass lines, individually and then together – Irene worked determinedly one afternoon on the song, “Wonderful Words of Life.”  Suddenly she clapped and shouted, “Hooray!  Hooray!!”

“What’s all the yelling?” asked Raymond Osborn, coming in the door.

“Success!”  she grinned.  “That’s the first time I’ve played a hymn all the way through with both hands.”

“Well, congratulations,” the family friend replied. “Who is your piano teacher?”

“Me!” she joked and then said, “Seriously, no one.  I’m just trying to learn on my own.”

“Keep up the good work,” he said on his way out of the room.

Not long after that exchange, Irene received a call from Mrs. Pottle, a local piano teacher and wife of the head of the music department at Southeastern College.  She said, “Irene, I would like to teach you to play the piano without charging you.  Can you come over Tuesday afternoon at four o’clock?”

“Of course,” a surprised Irene said quickly.  “Thank you!”

On Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Pottle explained, “A friend of your asked me to teach you.  He thinks you have promise as a pianist, so let’s begin.”

For thirty minutes, Irene was thrilled, carefully following instructions as she played the marvelous baby grand piano in the living room of the Pottles’ large, two-story, white frame house with a wrap-around porch next to the railroad near the college campus.  Then Dr. Pottle arrived home.

“What is happening here?” he asked.

“Meet Irene, my newest student,” she replied.

“Oh, no,” he announced, “you are not taking on another student.  You have been ill and there is no way you can add something else right now.  You know what the doctor said!”

Irene sat in stunned silence until an embarrassed Mrs. Pottle reluctantly said, “He’s right, Irene.  I really want to teach you, but I can’t at this time.”

So after only one half of a piano lesson, a dejected Irene plodded home alone.

Later on a warm July evening, as the Vinyard family ate their usual beans and rice and cornbreadc supper, the phone rang.  Mama answered it and almost immediately said, “Oh, no!”  When she finished talking, she turned and said, “Raymond Osborn has had a heart attack!”

After his hospitalization, Mr. Osborn recuperated at home for several weeks.  The doctor thought the south Louisiana heat in an unair-conditioned office might be too stressful for Raymond.  On his first day at home, his wife, Emilie, called Irene.

“Dr. Aycock wants someone to be with Raymond at all times in case of an emergency.  Since I work in the mornings and Ray Lee and Judy both have other obligations, I need help.  Would you come and sit with him?”

“Of course,” Irene answered.

When Irene arrived at the Osborn home the next morning, Mrs. Osborn explained, “I need you here while I work from 8:30 until 11:30 and then I will come home to prepare lunch.  Each day my husband will rest in the living room and read or do his paperwork.  You may bring something of your own with you to do.  If there is any problem, call the emergency number for help and then call me at my work number posted next to the phone.”

“Irene,” Mr. Osborn asked, as his wife left the house, “how are your piano lessons coming along?”

“I’m improving, sir,” she replied truthfully, “but it’s hard to do when I only practice once or twice a week at church.”

“Let’s make this a useful time then,” he suggested.  “We moved the old upright our children used into the hallway under the stairs when we bought our baby grand.  Why don’t you play it every day while you are here?  I will correct you when I hear something wrong.”

Delighted, she headed for the piano stool and twirled around on it until it was the right height.  “Start with some favorite of yours,” he called from the living room.  So she tried Christmas carols, only to discover that except for “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” most were written in keys she had difficulty playing.  She decided to try an easier hymn, “The Light of the World Is Jesus.”

“No, no, no,” Mr. Osborn finally objected.  “Stop jumping around, Irene.  Start with Hymn Number One, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and work on it until you can play it all the way through without a single mistake!”

Irene groaned, but complied – day after day, three hours each morning for two weeks!  Following the same practice pattern she used at church, she could soon play several familiar hymns.  For some inexplicable reason, flats were always easier to play than sharps, so she preferred songs with those key signatures.  More importantly, she definitely developed the habit of daily practice.  So, after her “adult-sitting” job ended, she returned to her sporadic sessions at the church piano.  However, she still wasn’t ready for an audience of more than one.

Shortly before Christmas, Daddy cut a small pine tree from the nearby woods, anchored it in a pail of rocks, and all the children decorated it.  Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about frontier family life inspired the Vinyards to make popcorn strings and cranberry rope of their own.  Presents, however, were meager.

On Christmas Eve, a big truck backed into the front yard and five strong men piled out of it.  With Daddy’s help, they unloaded the extremely heavy piano that Irene practiced on at the Osborn home.  Maneuvering and re-maneuvering, they finally managed to squeeze it into Grandma and the girls’ ten-by-sixteen-foot bedroom along side their two full-sized beds, a cedar chifforobe, and a bookcase topped with a black rotary-dial telephone.  As they called “Merry Christmas!” and drove away, all the children were shouting, “Play something, Irene!”

Excitedly she tried, only to discover that all eighty-eight keys were stuck hard and fast.  Not a sound came from that piano!  With disappointment written all over her face, Irene cried, “What an awful Christmas present!  Why would anyone give us a piano that we can’t play?”

Daddy explained, “The roof at the Osborn house leaked and dripped water onto the piano, Irene; and no one saw it until it was too late.  Raymond thought we might be able to save it enough for you kids to enjoy anyway.”

“But, how?” they all chorused.

An experience maintenance person, Daddy thought out loud, “The presence of a steady, low heat should dry out wet wood so it doesn’t crack.  Let’s hang a light inside the piano that will burn all the time,” he proposed.

He quickly installed the bulb and then instructed them, “Every day, I want each one of you to play every key at least once.” And, that’s what six children, and sometimes Grandma, did, day after day, until the sound of each ivory-less key slowly rejoined the piano.  A trained musician would have flinched at the cacophony, but to Irene and her siblings, the old piano made mellow music.

With everyone wanting to play, the home-grown piano lessons sometimes became so enthusiastic that Daddy had to yell for peace and quiet.  Everyone, even the boys, Charles and Gary, took turns plunking away, although not all persevered to conquer the instrument.  Soon the once-wet-now-dry Christmas piano added daily tunes of joy to their lives.

Ultimately Irene reached her original goal.  Her friend, Virginia, proudly watched as she, and eventually two other sisters, play hymns on Sunday morning for the sixty-five teenagers in the Intermediate Department.  Later, on Youth Sunday, the Osborns and the Vinyards all beamed with pride as Irene played the organ and sister, Paulette, the piano.  Of course, Irene used the foot pedals only on “Flee As A Bird,” the offertory she and Paulette had worked on for hours.

Irene decided her next challenge would be to play hymns she didn’t know, so she began to sight read and then deliberately to learn new songs.  Her skills grew until she began to accompany congregational singing at the SLC Baptist Student Union chapel services and eventually she became the pianist for Sheilah Baptist Church in Tickfaw, a nearby community.

Several years later, Irene learned an even different piano lesson, when Daddy telephoned her to say, “Ray Lee, the oldest Osborn daughter, asks that we return the piano to her.”

Shocked and hurt, Irene asked angrily, “Why would anyone want to take back a Christmas present?  Especially after all these years?”

“Well, Irene,” Daddy explained, “she and her husband are into collecting antiques.  For sentimental reasons she wants to redo the old piano she and her brother and sister used growing up.  You can understand her feelings.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she groaned.  “I do understand that they all learned to play on it, but we did, too.  I love that old piano more than anyone can imagine.  What am I going to do?”

“It’s your decision,” he said.

The piano represented so many joys and accomplishments, years of fun and work to all the Vinyards, how could she give it back?  Besides, it was a beautiful piece of oak furniture that she had dreamed of refinishing herself for her own home one day.  For a person who possessed little of significance, owning that old piano filled with memories really mattered to her.

“It was a gift, after all, and no one is required to return a gift, is she?” Irene argued with herself for days.

Then on the Sunday morning before Christmas as she played carols on the church piano, she smiled, remembering how difficult those songs had been to play that first day at the Osborn home.  “What would Jesus do in this situation?” she asked herself.

When the congregation sang, “We Three Kings,” the words bearing gifts kept repeating in her mind.  Suddenly her hands faltered on the keyboard, because she realized that on her long ago Christmas Eve, Mr. Osborn had come bearing not the gift of a piano, but the gift of music.  He had given her the opportunity to learn to play ANY piano.

Tears of gratitude slid down Irene’s face as she realized she could give the gift of music, too, by returning the piano to his daughter.  The beloved old family treasure would evoke memories, memories of piano lessons and life lessons that now included the Vinyards as well as the Osborns.  The issue settled in her mind, Irene humbly sang with the other worshippers as she played, “Guide us to Thy Perfect Light.”

THE END