A Bit of Beethoven
A bit of Beethoven has been hitching a ride in my memory since I snubbed him at the Davis Elementary Talent Show when I was in the third grade.
I’m at that proverbial fork in the road of life where I’m paying attention to a desire to downsize. I want to haul around a bit less baggage, simplify, minimize where I can. I want to travel a bit lighter.
On a recent weekend morning, this intention led me to embark on an an archeological dig under my bed. I grabbed a utility knife from the junk drawer and set out to slice open the duct-taped cardboard boxes that had been stored there for years, sweep away the dust and uncover what I’d buried for safe-keeping a lifetime ago. I really had no inkling about what I’d discover. And while I don’t consider myself a packrat, it’s fair to say that I perhaps have a few too many bird figurines and photo-less frames, half-skeins of tangled yarn and mate-less silver earrings. To this excavation I attached a hope that I would be able to let a few things go.
Late that afternoon, after hours of agonizing over the contents of the boxes and sorting everything into stacks of ‘keep/give-away/what the hell is this?’, I took one last look under the bed.
Tucked in the back corner against the wall, I discovered a small, long forgotten wicker chest. Lifting the lid with equal measures of curiosity and dread, I discovered long forgotten treasures from my childhood that I’d not been able to part with: the signature album from high school, packed with faded scribbles from the choir geeks and journalism nerds who were my friends back then. Ribbons and certificates from a few seasons on the track team (my build made me a thrower, not a runner). The purple stuffed hippo named Hurky that I got for my 6th birthday and was not at all ashamed to still possess well into adulthood, and a small, cheap, tarnished golden trophy I won for taking 3rd place in the grade school talent show when I was 9 years old.
I was not a talent show kind of kid. I was shy and dorky and mostly wanted the company of my family, my stuffed hippo and one or two close friends. But when the sign-up sheet for this talent show was posted in the melon-colored hallway at Davis Elementary, a rogue wave of unanticipated courage washed over me. I grabbed the pencil hanging from the twine attached to the clipboard before I could change my mind, and, in my heavy third-grade backhand, scrawled: “NAME: Kathy D. — TALENT: piano.”
My grandma Mary began teaching my siblings and I to play the piano when I was six years old. Piano lessons were a consistent family outing, as steady and expected as attending school Monday through Friday and going to Sunday School every weekend. Just like school and church, in my family, piano lessons were not optional. Every Saturday morning, we’d trek to grandma’s house at 9 a.m., after we’d emptied our bowls of cornflakes and glasses of milk. Once there, my two older sisters, my little brother and I would each take a thirty- minute turn at Grandma’s almond colored spinet.
She sat with perfect posture on a wooden dining chair just to the right of the piano bench, close enough that I could smell her perfume and watch her lips move out of the corner of my eye as she mouthed ‘one-two-three-one-two-three’ to mark the intended beat.
Grandma Mary was a woman whose temperament leaned toward gentleness, thoughtfulness and keeping a fair distance from anything that would draw too much attention to herself. Yet, as a piano teacher, she was one tough cookie. Firm and strict, she was not at all hesitant to take her freshly sharpened red pencil and circle all the notes and fingerings I had fumbled. Her expectations were high, and I had to work hard to earn the giant check-mark she’d place in the upper right-hand corner of any piece of sheet music, once she felt I’d learned and played the song well.
She set the lessons in motion with the standard piano teaching fare of the day: instruction books by John Thompson, John W. Schaum and the dreaded Fingerpower, which contained page after page of formidable scales. To keep me motivated beyond theory worksheets and arpeggio exercises, she’d also provide a special song to practice, a song we’d spend months preparing for her annual springtime recital.
When I was 9 years old, the recital piece she’d selected for me was Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise’. Lah-dum-dah-dah-dee-dum-dah-dee-dah, dum-dah-dee-dah, dum-dah-dee-dah (repeat). I fell in love with the lilting melody the first time she played it for me. The phrasing, the tender yet potent movement and interplay of the eighth and sixteenth notes, the story the song seemed to be telling measure by measure captivated my young heart. My 9-year-old self couldn’t grasp all it meant, but I did understand that something special stirred inside me when I practiced every afternoon between those Saturday lessons. I played it triumphantly at the recital, my feet tucked into shiny patent leather shoes just barely able to reach the sustain pedal.
Now, clipboard in hand, fresh off my recital and just a few weeks until the Talent Show, with Beethoven as perfected as my chubby fingers could manage, the decision about what I’d play seemed obvious: I would play ‘Fur Elise’ for my classmates, their parents and the teachers, the janitor and the cafeteria ladies. My introverted self took one deep breath, and then another. I hung the clipboard back on the wall and skipped off to recess.
I had a plan. I felt ready and sure, until just a few days before the talent show, when I peeked at the program that had been printed on the ancient mimeograph machine. Standing on tip-toes to read it, where it was tacked to the cork bulletin board in the cafeteria, I quickly scanned the flier for the scheduled presenters and showcased talents. As I slowly took it all in, my breathing turned shallow. My eyes began to sting and my heart sank.
Somewhere between dancers and gymnasts, magicians and comics, skateboarders and yo-yo wizards, I choked. I decided in that moment that playing my beloved ‘Fur Elise’, when compared with the other talents, would just not be good enough. Even though I loved the song and could play it well enough to warrant grandma’s coveted check-mark, I feared it would be eclipsed by the more shimmering acts. I feared it would be plain. I feared it would be nothing special.
Once home after school and panicked to find a substitute song at the last minute, I scrambled around for something “popular”, something applause-worthy to play. At the bottom of a jumbled pile of sheet music in the piano bench, I found a Beatles song that had been getting lots of top-40 air-play on the local soft-rock station, and I decided to play it instead. Surely this melody would capture the attention and interest of the audience. But this swap came at a cost: the piano part on Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’, is just one major chord after another. The vocals and the guitars, at least on this particular Beatles song, have all the nuance and melody. The piano part is dull and repetitive, a lifeless “chomp-chomp-chomp”.
Too insecure to play what I loved, too afraid that it wouldn’t measure up, I settled and traded in lilting flourishes for unimaginative repetition. At the talent show, under the blue-tinged fluorescent gymnasium lights, I walked to the piano, sat down on the bench and scooted it forward to give my hands the space they needed. From the first F Major chord to the last, I wished I had gone with my heart and played my beloved ‘Fur Elise’. Third place was gracious, to say the least.
Reaching into the wicker chest now and turning the chipped and tarnished trophy in my hands, I felt a twinge shoot through me. A twinge of regret because I did not trust my creative gut and stay with what I loved. A twinge of sadness because I let what other people might think of my playing matter more to me than my love of playing. A twinge of recognition at how often the question of ‘enoughness’ rises up in me still. And yet, a twinge of grace for the threads of humanity that weave through every moment, those threads that sometimes cause me to choke, to hold back, to settle.
I believe that I come from, am surrounded by and infused with creative spirit. I believe we all are. I am most myself when I am co-creating, joining imaginations, hearts and hands and minds to bring beauty to the world.
In the last several years, I’ve been taught to knit, I’ve taken a mosaic class, I’ve learned to do some gardening. I spent six weeks and a whole lot of money learning to work with stained glass. A friend and I spent two months of Tuesday evenings at the local community college working with a pottery wheel. And here’s a truth I am willing to tell: I’m sort of lousy at all of these things. My knit scarves are full of holes. My mosaic and glass projects are uneven and chunky. I just cannot get the cucumbers or peas to thrive.
And yet, there’s something about having my hands in the clay and the glass and the yarn that is a dose of gladness for me, I find my spirit calm and hopeful. Noodling around on the piano to work out a song, keeping my butt in the chair to get some writing done, digging around in a tiny corner of the yard to see if I can beautify it a bit, this is all so life-giving. Creative.
Co-creating. It is messy and flawed and unfinished and I am never quite sure of what I am doing. And I am never happier.
That twinge I feel when I see that little trophy now is also a twinge of gratitude. Because I recognize that somewhere between 9 years old and today, I’ve grown into following my heart and my gut, even when I recognize that what I create may not be the best, may not shimmer. The result is not the point. The creating is.
And here, there is spaciousness and welcome. Unhindered by the anxiety of focusing on the outcome, I can scatter a table at home with paint and glass and paper and glue and beads. I can scribble out the notes to a new melody running through my head. I can cast the yarn on my needles. I can gently set seeds into the soil. I can listen to my heart, and trust my creative gut. I can tuck John and Paul and George and Ringo back into the piano bench, skooch in a bit closer to the keyboard, and play a bit of Beethoven.
