And so, it begins once again. My strange dream with its desolate beauty. Yes, again, I hear the fluid strains from the grand piano stood on the shore. I cannot imagine anything more damaging to a beautiful instrument than salt and sand. But in my dream, I can see the movement of my hands over the keys as I continue to play a haunting sonata to my sole audience, the wrathful tumultuous ocean. When I play, it is as if I can hear the overwhelming forces of the wind and sea making their most thunderous applause. The angry waves crash in yet I don’t feel compelled to leave, not even move. I want to play and play…until suddenly everything is swept away, me, the piano, the music…all…gone. The terrible sound of the silence is everywhere. The tension and darkness of that moment seem like the passing of eternity. Suddenly there is no wind howling, no crashing of waves, just the eerie silence of a world without a piano.
I know it’s a dream, but I know, too, that it was a dream of my death.
My neighbors sometimes come over to borrow some lemon juice or garlic powder. Since I live by myself, I like to have visitors. These last years, well, loneliness has come. I always invite them in to chat. I like it when they stop in my kitchen to admire the sketches on the kitchen wall, drawn by my departed wife, and are the legacy of the long and colorful life I have led.
Today, however, I’m their sweet, broken, old man but I do sometimes wonder if they are secretly disgusted by the array of cobwebs they pass on the way through the entrance hall on their way to the kitchen. She’s not here, you see, to keep my home warm and free from such trivial things. I suppose most people get rid of cobwebs as soon as they notice them, but when my guests have left, I look at them and wonder if she will come back to remove them. So, I let them spin their work on the ceiling, between the potted plants, and even against her portrait, that I keep on my piano next to the pebble. I can see why they are attracted to her. It was taken two years before she died. I think this is still how she looks in the next world. The lucky woman will be beautiful forever.
When I play my piano, it is to remember her, to reach her, so that she understands where I am, still alive. The pebble on the lid of the Steinway Grand Piano shakes and even rattles a little when I play. I know it is her. It is her heart, this pebble that sits on my piano. It is the one object in the house I do not allow the spiders to touch.
When I come to the black and white keys in the evening, I can hear her voice. I was twenty-seven. She was pregnant with our first child. I can still feel myself being shaken gently awake, and hear the warm voice of my wife. “It’s coming today. I’m so excited, darling. We are expecting our first child, and now we finally have your piano.” She leaped out of bed like a child on a Sunday morning. “I’ll make some tea. We’re late, darling, it’s almost seven-thirty. It’s coming at eight.” I heard the shower spark to life and the sharp sound of water forced against the clear glass. In the mirror, I watched her disrobe, saw her belly that held our first child before she disappeared into the steamy cubicle. We had waited three years for the Piano. Money troubles, contractual problems, living in different rental properties, so many reasons why we did not own a Grand Piano. That was going to end. Our new home would have a piano.
All these many years later, I step out of bed, struggling to get my back straight. I cannot imagine what it must be like to run freely again. I wait, sitting on the side of the bed, for that moment when everything finds its rightful place in my spine, and I can raise my arms to stretch the sleep away from my muscles.
Lately, I’ve taken to showing my stories to anyone who calls. Why not? My life is nearly over — they enjoy my rantings. My stories move them as much as my music.
Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, squeezing paste onto the brush, I hear her voice as if she were still standing in the mirror beside me. She is humming, she is happy. I’ve lost count how many songs I’ve written for her. The walls in my home lined with framed awards. They mean nothing, what did these people know about a song written at two in the morning, or alone in a hotel room, in an airplane seat, or standing at a grave? I’ll tell you, nothing.
In the end, we are just an idea of God, set free in the world to experiment, explore, and do what we can for each other. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s all. Sometimes people are crazy wild. Sometimes people are frustrated with their lives, held back, unable to survive, crushed by the pace of life and people rushing by them but they cannot run. Some are dragged down by poverty, by responsibility, by the need to find ways to be something better than they are, perhaps drugs, drink, children, jobs, help take them away from the drudgery of their lives and people pass them by, interested only in their lives. Some people stop. Like a woman stopped for me, ‘Hello,’ she said.
Everything I’d done wrong to that point, all the bad practical jokes, the inability to be a good son, a loyal friend, the worst lover, it all changed with that word. ‘Hello,’ she said. That very second I became a better man.
On the top of the piano, I keep the ‘Hello’ pebble, the very one we found on the beach that day we first met. It is white, heart-shaped, and when I play the piano, it seems to move.
She was walking toward me, her hair blown wild, flying, and barefooted. I was a crazy man. At war with the world. Myself, maybe. She stopped. I never knew why, and in all my life she never told me. She stooped to pick up the pebble, wet with ocean, and heart shaped. ‘Hello,’ she said and gave me the stone in my hand.
“Do you want a cup of tea,” I asked.
I was born unwanted but not unloved. I imagined a mother in a gypsy caravan; it was blue and yellow with waves leaping all round. She danced with me in her arms, kissing my cheeks, calling me her little fellow and skipping over the sand until she had to let go. Things happen in the slip of a ray of sunshine, and there’s no guessing why. A simple shift of cloud and thunder happens. I was left there, on the shore, breathless, no explanations, nothing, left to wander the world seeking answers. Those answers came in the form of the love of a woman who stopped to say ‘hello.’
The kitchen back then, I recall, was bright with yellows, blues, and greens running around the walls. Natural plants were growing on the windowsill, planted there by my mother. I took the peonies and placed them in the middle of the breakfast table, next to old sailing charts of the Western Isles. I poured the stranger some tea and brought it to the table. The heart-shaped pebble she had given me, I sat under the peonies.
She never left my life for one day after that morning.
The morning the piano was delivered seems a blur, except this: when she stepped from the shower, three months pregnant, I embraced her.
“My god, you’re a great looking woman, darling. Should I take you back to bed and have my wicked way with you?” She laughed, kissed my cheek, and said: “Rarely do we have better things to do, my sexy man, but your piano is arriving. I need to get dressed, and so do you.”
She danced away, grabbing the towel to cover herself. I stepped into the shower, closed the door and turned down the temperature…needing cold water to cool my ardor and the ache in my body to have her. When I stepped out, she was stood in front of the mirror drying her hair, in her panties and bra. I should have immediately turned around and stepped back into the cold shower. She was adorable.
So many years I could have lived with the wrong women, or her with an unsuitable partner. One day a warm morning wind brought a strange connection, and from that simple meeting, hearts lost control.
Love is never easy, and when that love becomes complicated by the love of children and doing the right things, love is tested by strength and devotion. Ours never once found wanting. Life could tear at us, make fun of us, hurl abuse, but we never lost that which occurred on that long-ago morning collision. We understood it was something real and honest and rare.
I am a man of music. A single note can touch me deeply; a lyric can make my day. Music was always something we had in our hearts, and together we taught each other and enjoyed all the many aspects of music. All that was left, in the end, was to play.
That’s what I do, you see. I play. When I do, well that’s when I think the pebble on the Steinway takes on a shine of its own. And I swear to you, it’s as if that heart-shaped stone can hum.
Then one day, my son asked if he could borrow the pebble on the piano. I was thrown. I never thought my son would want to take the pebble for his reasons. Part of me was indignant at the suggestion – he knew the story behind the pebble. At the same time, a whole part of me — my terrible nuisance of an ego — is flattered. All my life I enjoyed showing off my wife.
“Yes, yes, of course, you can borrow it,” I then respond. I retrieve the sacred pebble from the top of the Steinway. “I’ve never let it out of my sight, son. Please be careful.”
He returned it the following day. He had shared with his children the story of his parent’s love. A week later, my grandchildren wanted to take the pebble to school. It was a ‘Grandparent Day.’ It worried me – the pebble could so easily be lost or broken. I tucked the heart-shaped pebble into my jacket pocket and went with my grandchildren to school that morning. They made me very proud. I left the school, tearful, both children holding my hands. Now every time I go out to get some bread, or just a bit of milk, people stop me and ask me about the pebble. They smile at me, tell me it’s a beautiful story. “You think so,” I say, smiling all over my face.
Today it happened. For some reason the shopping bags had felt heavier, my arms ached, and now pain shot down my arm sharply. It was sudden, fleeting. Everything was fine, for a while. Then the pain altered in length or width.
Sitting on my piano stool, I slump gently forward, resting my head on the lid of the Steinway.
Then I hear my wife speaking.
“Darling,” she says, “I’m happy you have nothing more to do than resting your head on top of the piano.”
Suddenly, the pain is gone.
“You look tired,’ she says. “We can take care of the cobwebs tomorrow. It doesn’t matter now; we have forever.”
When two men hit the reset button and decide to go out looking for the good in the world, they not only find it but also a lot more.
P.S. The title is listed on Amazon under Look for Something Good by Robert Drews (not by Robert H. Drews)
Timeless wisdom and advice on the art of living for today’s young and old: The art of thinking, the art of loving, the art of working, the art of leadership, the art of growing old.
A new translation by Sergio E. Serrano of this inspirationa
