The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 31. In the Car Again Shopping Memory Lane, No. 2

This was our next stop shopping memory lane.  I lived here with my parents after they had acquired their new-found wealth.  This is only half of the house.  The other side is beyond that big, green bush on the left where there is a hidden brick wall, and on the other side a courtyard that the house wraps around.  The living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom all look out onto it.  Although the house had a small yard along the street, it didn't feel like it because the housing association took care of it.  One simply walked through it up that walkway to get inside.  The courtyard, however, was glorious, with red terracotta tiles, large banana plants and a Jacuzzi.  That gave me some connection to the earth, which I desperately needed, having grown up in a small town.

We lived here my tenth-grade year of high school--the one year of my life that I experienced a little of the life of the upper middle class.  The large, airy home looking out onto the courtyard was wonderful.  The living room was large, and two of the walls were covered in rich, maple-colored wood encasing built-in cabinets and book cases.  The windows facing the street had wooden shutters that let in slatted light.  The wall facing the courtyard was glass, and the leaves of banana plants gleamed under the noonday sun.

What really made the room was an 1870s Erard concert grand piano my parents acquired at Joe Small's auction for a little over a thousand dollars--a steal.  The one pictured below is either the same model, or one very close to it.  Today, that piano goes for around $75,000.  Unfortunately, when my parents moved back to Utah, they traded the piano for an early 1900s black upright because the grand was getting damaged in their new home with south-facing windows. That was dumb.  There's no other way to put it.  They could have given it to my sister.  They would have no way of knowing this, but her son turned out to be a great musician, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind having an extraordinary instrument like the one below in his living room.  Even if we didn't have a great musician in the family, the piano is unique enough that I'm sure it would have been passed down generation to generation.  I know I wouldn't mind having it, and I can't play "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Even just as furniture, it is a work of art. I hope that wherever it is, it is well looked-after and well-loved.

The piano was impressive enough that even though I was already in 10th grade, I decided I should take piano lessons.  I demonstrated no natural talent; I had troubles keeping time; I didn't practice enough.  Still, I enjoyed it, and my mother said I played with feeling.  She should know.  She's played by ear since she was a child, and I grew up in a home where I came home from school to sound of the piano or organ everyday.  I'd have to yell so that she could hear me.  It was wonderful.  So much nicer than the sound of the vacuum in the middle of reruns of Gilligan's Island.  My mom always says she could have been a concert pianist, and if you heard her play, you'd have no doubt that is true.  I didn't realize it as a kid because I didn't know what jazz was, but she is really a jazz pianist.  She hears a song, takes in the basics, plays it, and then it becomes part of her repertoire, but each time she plays it, it's different.  It's both the same song, but it's not.  She goes off on these wild, beautiful runs that bleed into other bits of song and then she returns to where she began.  It's jazz.   The odd thing is, other than Big Band, she's not a jazz fan.  I'm not sure why; she should be.

It is in this house that I first realized I was an artist.  I wasn't sure what that looked like for me--a painter, an architect or a poet--but I knew I was feeling and experiencing things in my interior world that I assumed not all persons do on a regular basis.  I knew this because they were new to me.  I hadn't always been an artist, and so I could tell the difference.  I don't know if it was a change in body chemistry or all the bullying I received in junior high, but I moved from being an extrovert to an introvert within three years, and beauty before all but completely ignored by me all of the sudden took on significance.  I listened to Elton John's Elton John album consistently.  I loved the strings, drama and depth of songs like "Sixty Years On" and "The King Must Die".  I realized what I wanted most out of life was to feel.  I went on walks.  I kept a journal.  I wrote poetry.  I spent a lot of time in our courtyard taking in the sun and watching light play on the leaves of banana plants.  I sat at that concert grand piano playing a very simplified version of "Lavender Blue" and in my head I was in concert backed by a great symphony pounding my soul into the keyboard before the world making the most extraordinary sounds.

I didn't know then what a Romantic was, but that's indeed what I was experiencing: a yearning for the sublime.  And in all those years, nothing has changed. No matter how pedestrian my day job, my home, my routine--my life's quest has been to touch fingers intimately with the divine, if only for seconds at a time.  To truly feel and see sunlight glazing oak leaves--the super-real right out my window--I decided in that home pictured above that was in fact the reason I was here.  Everything else was of little consequence.  I no longer lived to exist.  I existed to live.  I didn't always remember that, but the times when I did were the times when I was truly happy.