Music in the Schools

The birth of a passion, I

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

By Stacey Warde

Part I

My dad traded his used lawnmower for my first piano. I was in sixth grade.

We lived in the condos, Tustin Village, a tight mix of family units separated only by paper-thin walls through which, as children, we could listen to our neighbors’ pillow talk.

We had no need for a lawnmower.

All that grew in front of our condo, along the concrete slab for a walkway to our front door, was ugly green ivy, a great place for rodents to thrive. The few lawns that could be mowed were kept by the homeowners association in the finely manicured commons, “the putting greens,” we called them — located between two community swimming pools — where at night some of the Village kids would gather to smoke marijuana and pair up for sex for the first time.

Once, my brother tied the end of a cat’s tail to a rope and was about to hoist the poor creature into the air from a tree branch around which he threw the rope, when an irate woman burst through the door of her condo facing the putting green, waved her broomstick at him and screamed: “If I was your mother, I’d beat your ass!”

My brother, unfazed, let go of the rope, more out of concern for his own safety than mercy for the cat, and said…