Piano

It was a day like many others
on Wightman Street
in East San Diego,
except that my mother
and grandmother
were crying.
I was two and a half
years old, and hadn't
seen this before.
"What's wrong?"
I asked my mother.
"President Roosevelt died,"
my mother said,
"he was a very good man,
and we liked him
very much. You wouldn't understand."
I didn't understand,
not at all.
I needed to think,
so I went and sat
under the keyboard
of the old, upright
piano.
That piano had come
with the rented house,
when my mother
was in high school.
She was hardly more
than that then,
only twenty-two.
My grandmother,
educated in an Irish
convent school,
was the only one
who could really play
that piano.
I loved it when she
would play The Steamboat
song. The music went like this:
do duh dút do do,
do duh dút do do,
do do do doo do,
do do do doo do.
My mother, who had less skill
and knowledge,
could play "I like coffee,
I like tea, I like the boys,
and the boys like me,"
When I was six or seven,
she showed me how
to play that song.
She said that my fingers were long,
like hers, and that I could reach
an octave.
The old piano, made in Chicago,
was always in tune.
The owner of house and piano,
Mr. Skinner, had a son
who played for the Pittsburgh
Pirates.
Duh duh dút duh duh,
I like the girls,
duh duh dút duh duh,
and the girls like me.
An octave is from "c"
to shining "c,"
and death has no power
over me.

 
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Jacobson Traxler.