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
