The Music Goes Round and Round  
By E. Noel Preston, MD

Grandma could play the piano better than anyone I knew, even the organist at church. Most of the time she would play in the afternoons, and I could hear her music coming out of the house and filling the neighborhood as soon as I got off the school bus and started walking up our driveway. 

She would play "The Spinning Song" and "The Ride of the Valkyries" and "God of Our Fathers," but my absolutely the best favorite was "The Stars and Stripes Forever," because she played it loud and fast and made the piano sound like trumpets and drums all at the same time.

I decided I wanted to play the piano too, but less than two years of lessons were enough to convince me, my parents, the piano teacher, and even my grandmother I would never be a pianist. I consoled myself by deciding to join the school band once I graduated from elementary school, and sure enough, the first class I signed up for at Ponce de Leon Junior High School was "Band."

Mr. Blum was the band teacher. He was a short, squatty little man with a large round head, dark hair, and big horned-rimmed glasses. He went around the room asking people what instrument they played. When he asked me, I said "I don't play anything, yet." 

Mr. Blum said, "Then why have you signed up for Band?"

"To learn how to play something."

"But you can't be in the band if you can't play anything."

"Well, how can I learn to play anything if I'm not in the band?"

Mr. Blum closed his eyes and waved his huge, fat hands in front of his face. "No, no," he said. "You don't understand. I'm sorry, but you just can't be in the band. You'll have to leave. Go back to the principal's office and sign up for something else."

By this time most of the classes were filled, and there wasn't any "something else." That's how I ended up in Elementary Woodworking, or "Shop." Instead of learning to play the trumpet or saxophone, I learned to run a lathe and jigsaw. I never learned how to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever," but I made dozens of cypress knee lamps and lots of hand-etched pewter trays. 

Grandma had been in a horse-and-buggy accident as a girl and had broken some of the bones in her back. Ever since then she had trouble sleeping, and almost every night she would come into my room about 2 or 2:30 in the morning and sit on the side of my bed. "Noel-ey, Noel-ey," she would call, rubbing my back. "Are you awake?" I would roll over and say "yes," and she would say, "I'm going downstairs for a cup of tea -- would you like to have some warm milk?"

I would follow her downstairs to the kitchen, and we would sit out on the front porch and look at the stars while we waited for her kettle to boil. She would show me the constellations and tell me stories of when she was a girl and how she met my grandfather. Other nights she would point out clouds around the moon and say it meant there would be rain the next day, or that a storm was 
coming, or that tomorrow would be very warm. And then we would drink our tea and milk and she would send me back to bed.

One night when I was about 15 years old I went to the movies and saw "Creature from the Black Lagoon," and I kept dreaming about monsters. We didn't have air conditioning back then, and the night was steamy and hot. There was a large oscillating fan on the bedroom floor, and it swept the warm, moist South Florida air back and forth across the room. Something made me wake up, and there was a dark, shadowy figure looming over me. I screamed and jumped up, striking out with my arms and legs. It was my 79-year-old Grandma, and I had kicked her in the face. She fell into the oscillating fan and broke her hip.

That broken hip didn't kill her, and neither did the next one five or six years later, but things were never the same afterwards. My parents got her a night attendant, and Grandma never came into my room to rub my back again. Soon after that I went away to college, and eventually my wonderful Grandma moved into a nursing home.

When Grandma died about 15 years later, my daughter Laura was just barely a year old. They never had the chance to know each other -- but I like to think they would have become the best of friends. When Laura was five years old my wife and I had Laura start taking piano lessons, and she took to them a heck of a lot better than I ever did -- and she showed not just a talent, but a love for the piano that even Grandma would have found astonishing. 

By the time she was 12 years old Laura was playing Bach Inventions, Chopin's Marche Militaire, Beethoven's Fur Elise, and almost everything out of the Notebook of Anna Magdelena Bach. She played songs from movie soundtracks and the Carol of the Bells at Christmas parties -- and I would come home from the office and sit in the living room and listen to the music and marvel at how well she could play. I wondered how things might have turned out if I had kept on taking lessons, and felt so happy that Laura had kept up with hers. But then I grew afraid she might lose interest in the piano and stop playing as she grew older. Her music teacher told me that students are more likely to keep taking lessons if they change to a higher quality instrument, and that was when Laura and I began our grand search for a grand piano. 

The piano teacher said an older piano would be better built and have a more resonant tone than a new one, and so for the next year and a half Laura and I searched the classifieds every Sunday morning. We looked under "Musical Instruments" and drew circles around the ads we thought were the most promising. And then, off we would go. We drove all over Fulton and Gwinnett and Cobb Counties -- several times. Laura played the same music on every piano we saw, so we could compare the sounds from each one. She would notice if the keys were sticky and whether the pedals worked, and I would crawl under the piano and tap on the sounding board with my rubber reflex hammer. 

We saw some beautiful pianos and we saw some that were just horrible. We talked with older people who were retired and downsizing their homes, with younger people who had inherited pianos they couldn't play and who wanted the money, and with middle aged people whose spouses or children had died and who didn't want the pianos around to remind them of the past. We saw pianos with dust and cobwebs and dead cockroaches inside, with ring stains from cocktail glasses on their lids, with scratches stupid people had carved into their surfaces, and we saw magnificent pianos that were astronomically expensive.

On the way home we would stop off for a soda and a giant soft pretzel and talk about the people and pianos we had seen, and whether we had liked any of the pianos enough to make an offer or whether we should keep on looking. Most of the time we decided to keep on looking, and the other times the seller and I couldn't agree on a price.

And then it happened. We were out in Smyrna one Sunday afternoon at a going-out-of-business piano store, and we found it. "It" was a brand new jet black grand piano with a mirrored glossy surface so shiny you could see your face in it. It was made in Germany and had a solid spruce sounding board, and the bass notes were so strong and deep it sounded like God talking. On the 
loud parts of "The Great Smoky Mountains" the bass notes rolled and thundered; on the softer, quieter parts they offered solace and comfort and peace and a quiet refuge from the troubles of the day. There was no doubt about it. It was Laura's -- and our search was over. 

A year or two later Laura was 14 years old and about to go into the ninth grade at a new school, and her mother and I encouraged her to join the school band. Since she could already read music and we had given her a used drum set for Christmas, we thought she might find it a good way to meet people and make new friends. Laura liked the idea, but only if she could play in the drum section. Her mother and I agreed, if she would keep up with her piano lessons -- and so, after a long, long time, a Preston finally joined the band. I can't play anything but a music box, but Laura -- beautiful, talented, lovely Laura -- bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, can play the piano. She can play the drums. And now, Lord God Almighty, she's joined the school band! She's going to play in band concerts, and march at football games, and be in parades, and play "The Stars and Stripes Forever," and do things I could only dream of. 

That was years ago. Now Laura is married and has four children. Her oldest is 12 and the next one is 10, and they play soccer and basketball, take horseback riding lessons, are in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and one of them plays the guitar and drums.

The music goes round and round, and it comes out mighty sweet.

E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a retired pediatrician.

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