Cement Mixer

There are many gifts my mother gave me during her transcendent life here on Mama Earth. One gift she gave me was one of music. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s an indelible part of my daily existence, and this from a woman who didn’t know Bach from Beethoven or Brahms. She knew the songs from the late 30s, the 40s, and early 50s. She'd played piano since she was six and her determination for me - and all my sisters - to play was indefatigable, and I thank her for it every time I sit down on the stool and stare down at the ivories.

When I was six years old, Mommy demanded (very judiciously) that I take piano lessons, and when I did, she made me practice every day. In the beginning I hated it. I couldn’t play worth a tinker’s cuss. At that young age, if I had a choice, I would have summarily given up after the first lesson, but she wouldn’t have it. If she could play, then by gum, I could, too.

A mother at the school where I taught once told me that she was having problems with her son. “He won’t practice the piano,” she said, and then asked, “How did your mother get you to practice?”

I didn’t mean to, but I let out a little bleat of a laugh because the question seemed ridiculous to me. Her son wasn’t old enough to decide for himself and some things you just gotta do in life because Mama says so! (I'm not a Dickensian schoolmaster, but I do believe there’s too much coddling of children. As Garrison Keillor said, and I paraphrase: "Nowadays it's four strikes and you're out because doesn't Little Johnny deserve one more chance?")

“Uh,” I said, “I really didn’t have a choice. She made me do it.”

A flicker of enlightenment passed over her eyes as if to say, “I’d never thought of that.” When I saw her weeks later, I asked her how it was going with her son. “It’s going well,” she replied, “because now he doesn’t have a choice.”

Mommy said there was a song for everything and every situation. I scoffed at this as a teenager until one day when we were driving down to Ocean City for an afternoon at the beach. We came to a detour and she sang, “Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…detour….”

“Is that really a song?” I asked.

“Yes, an oldie,” she said. “There’s a song for everything.”

“No, there isn’t.”

Just then we pulled up at a stoplight and in front of us was one of those cement mixer trucks. You know the kind – the truck part is in the front and on top is a giant cylinder rolling round and round mixing the cement so it doesn’t harden.

My mom sang out, “A puddle o’ vooty, a puddle o’ gooty…cement mixer, putty putty…cement mixer, putty putty….”

She went on to sing the entire song. “Liberace used to sing it,” she said when she finished, and that’s when I truly realized that my sapient mother was right – if there was a song for a cement mixer, then there certainly was a song for everything else in the world.

My first teacher was Mrs. Durand, a lady who lived in the town next to us. I’m not sure how my mom heard of her, but someone must have recommended her. Every Wednesday I was at her house by 3:30 for a half hour lesson. Her three kids got out of school after me, so they usually arrived home by 3:45. They lay on the rug in the living room, sucking on lollipops, crunching potato chips, gnawing on the piano bench leg, all the while watching me and their mom at the piano, her correcting my tempo, me seething at being watched by the cretins crawling around underneath the bench, snickering behind me.

Mrs. Durand taught me the fundamentals: reading music, a little fingering, and tempo. After a year, Mrs. Durand told my mom, “I can’t teach him anymore. He needs another teacher.”

That’s when Miss Growl came into the picture. She was the music teacher at my grammar school, and I’m not kidding when I say her name was really Growl, but she was a beauty. I was infatuated with her. She was statuesque and had a mellifluous voice. I wanted to play my all for her, and I did. In two years, I had gotten to the same point as I had with Mrs. Durand: time for a new teacher.

I don’t know how my mom found out about Mrs. Davis, but she did her research. Mrs. Davis was a myopic little wisp of a lady with horn-rimmed glasses who lived in a large house that I thought was a mansion. Her husband worked at Mobil Oil where my dad worked, but they didn’t know each other – different divisions: blue collar (my dad) and white collar (Mr. Davis).

By the time I began instruction with Mrs. Davis, I was ten years old and ready for the great classical composers; that’s all she taught. There were no trite little ditties with insipid titles like “Going to the Circus” or “The Happy Chicken”; it was pure classical training and I ate it up. It’s what I’d been waiting for since I'd seen the ad on TV.

It happened one Saturday afternoon, probably a year before I started lessons with Mrs. Davis. I watched television and on came an ad for Time Life Books’ inimitable collection of classical music. Three hundred selections of the world's most famous music ever written! Incredible! All for four easy payments of $9.99. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. I had to have it. I begged, I borrowed from my sister, I even stole two dollars from my dad’s spare change jar. My mom ordered it, supplementing the balance as part of my birthday gift, and when it arrived, I unwrapped the plastic cassettes as if they were four miniature holy grails. I think I even heard an angelic choir from up on high as I inserted the first cassette into our stereo, plugged in the headphones, lay down on the floor and closed my eyes. Da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaa! Beethoven. 5th Symphony. I had chills – the good kind.

The thing about the Time Life Books tapes was that the selections were only snippets of the themes from the great classical works. They never said in the ad that the music wasn’t presented in its entirety. If I were more mature I would have realized that the world’s three hundred most beloved classical masterpieces would have never fit on four cassette tapes. One got maybe a minute or two of each opus, and that was it. For years I thought Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was one minute and forty-two seconds long.

It was a fortuitous time when I started with Mrs. Davis. I was the only one in the family who was listening to classical music. Kathy’s fave was John Denver. I had no idea what Cindy or Sandy were listening to because they were in college. I think they listened to Sandy Patti. My mom and dad listened to the occasional easy listening or Christian radio station. My world, my musical universe was filled with symphonies, minuets, arias, and scherzos. Mrs. Davis was the one who showed me that I could play the music I loved.

When I first walked in, she said, “Sit down. Play something.”

My mom had bought me a piano book with short pieces by famous composers. I played a little Mozart piece I had taught myself.

“All right. I’ll take you on as a student.”

I hadn’t realized that it was an audition. If I had, I probably would have wet my Scooby-Doo Underoos.

I studied with Mrs. Davis for five years, and all the while my mom was there as the patient listener in the kitchen, with me practicing while she cooked dinner, or cleared the table, or sat down for a cup of tea.

She was a master of reverse psychology. When I was at my most frustrated during the learning process, when I banged at the piano with hammer hands and threw my books on the floor and stomped on them, her voice, like a zephyr, floated into the living room from the kitchen: “That sounded great, Timmie. Play it again for me.”

Huh? I thought it sounded awful. I either couldn’t get the fingering right, or the tempo was all wrong, or I just didn’t like the piece of music. But all the time, no matter how poorly I played, my mom was there to encourage me by telling me – even though she was probably cringing in the kitchen – that I sounded great.

That bolstered me. I would sit down and play it again. She would encourage me more, complimenting me, asking me to play it again and again. I did, until finally, I knew the piece forwards and back.

Even though my mom didn’t listen to classical music and had no education in it, she inadvertently opened me up to this world of music that I hadn’t known. By making me take lessons, encouraging me during bad days when my fingers didn’t seem to synch with what I was reading on the page, finding the right piano teachers for me, she led me down through the archway of musical transcendence. She gave me a gift that I will have for a lifetime.

During the last few years of my mom’s life, when I was home I often sat down at the piano and played the classical music she loved. By listening to me over the years, she developed her own kind of resonance with it. She enjoyed some of the Debussy I played, several of the Mozart sonatas, and Beethoven’s “Pathetique”. She’d sit in the loveseat next to the piano in the sunroom and listen, sometimes falling asleep, but always there when I sat down to play.

F. and I went to see a movie the other day. When we got back to the apartment, he went outside to work on a sculpture and I opened up a book of Mozart Sonatas to a Sonata in F Major that my mom always asked me to play. She’s gone, but she’s not. She’s with me always, and while I played I felt that she was in my own kitchen, over the sink, washing my dishes, saying, “That sounds great, Timmie. Play it again for me.”