When W hen My My Sister Sissteer Plays Plays the the Piano Pia ano o By Judy Dykstra-Brown
The first notes, beautiful and true, float like a memory up the stairs. In the week I’ve been here in her house with her, she has not played the piano and so I thought her music was gone like her memory of what day it is or whether I am her sister, her daughter or herself. Yet on this morning after her 76th birthday celebration, Music slips like magic from the keys: song after song, from “Fur Elise” to a sweet ballad I don’t know the name of-sure and correct at first, then with a heartfelt emotion we had both forgotten. “Midnight Concerto,” “Sunrise, Sunset”-song after song expressed in an unfaltering language-some synchronicity of mind and hand her brain has opened the door to. While I listen, time stands still for me as it has for her so often in the past few years as yesterday and today shuffle together to crowd out all consideration of future fears. For ten minutes or more, she segues from melody to melody with no wrong note. Then “Deep Velvet,” a song she has played from memory so many times, dies after twenty-four notes. Like a gift held out and snatched away, I yearn for it, pray she’ll remember. After an uncharted caesura, her music streams out again, sweet and sure, for a staff or two— the sheet music giving her a guide her brain so often can’t. But after a longer pause, I know it is lost like the thread of so many conversations. A hiccup of memory, folding itself away. “Come And Worship” chimes out like the tolling of a bell. The wisp of the old hymn, two phrases only— before it, too, fades. That sudden muffled sound. Is it a songbook displaced from its stand as she searches for another or the lid of the piano, quietly closing on yet another partial memory?
Saw you in the Ojo 53