Letting Go of the Family Piano - by Cherrie Thornton
In the mid 1970s, our well loved Toyota Corolla was totaled in a parking lot accident. The insurance payout was $600. Just enough to buy a piano for our son who really, really wanted to take piano lessons.
This piano has lived with various family members ever since, traveling with us from Oklahoma to Colorado to a stint in Oregon, back to Colorado, and finally coming back to me in my home in 2015. I told my local son and daughter-in-law that I would enjoy playing again.
I had taken piano lessons in second to fifth grades and then had moved on to cello and other string instruments through the years. While the piano was living with me earlier in Colorado, I had resumed piano lessons for a few years. I think I was trying to recapture that flexibility and strength in my hands, which had been aging along with the rest of me. So while I enjoyed playing again, my expectations led to frustration, so I stopped.
About the same time, one of my sons and his family were living in Oregon and wanted a piano to bring music into their lives. The piano then took a road trip to Portland. This family eventually moved back to Fort Collins … full circle for the piano to return to me in 2015.
This time I said I just wanted to doodle around a bit, just playing to play. I dug around and found my old 1940s “John Thompson’s Modern Course for the Piano”, cost $1.00. These pieces, especially the ones in the key of C Major, I could manage to enjoy playing. No matter if I stumbled a little now and then. Even then, over these past few years, I found myself thinking, oh, I should play the piano today, and at times I did. But not often or consistently.
Recently, I decided I wanted more space in my home and looked at the piano, thinking it was attractive but took up space, and I just wasn’t playing it. I believe that musical instruments are meant to be played, not just sit there and look attractive.
My family had tried to give the piano away before and had not been successful, everyone seemed to want electronic instruments. I thought this would be hard to do and take a long time, but I decided to just give it a try and listed it on a local social network. Within 24 hours, there were three people interested, and I quickly found a new home for my piano. In the couple of days before the new family came to pick up the piano, I played it more than I had in the past year. I found myself feeling a little weepy as I played and as I thought about letting go of the family piano. I was surprised to be feeling sad. I knew it was the right thing to do. This piano would be played and enjoyed, as it should be. So why was I sad?
They say that aging is a series of losses, some large, some small. I thought this one was small, but I wonder …
Cherrie Thornton grew up in New York state and Florida, where she graduated from the University of Florida in 1963 with a degree in mathematics. She was married with two sons, and now has four grandsons. After several years as a stay at home mother, she began a career of computer programming first at Oklahoma State University and then at Kodak Colorado Division. Later after earning her Masters in Counseling Psychology at the University of Northern Colorado in 1994, she changed her career path to mental health and social work with older adults. Since retirement, she has enjoyed family and friends, travel, painting, and volunteering.
