Originally posted 05.02.2005
Saturday afternoon we swung out for Caledonia, Minnesota, to look at the Steinway Liz’s husband Joel had restored. I was a little sleepy, dozy in the back seat of the car—my weekend 10-miler had turned into 12, looping up around the base of the bluff, through the marsh, over the river and through the woods (well, really, it’s more of a park). In my lap I held the cookies we’d bought at the People’s Food Co-op. Once an inconveniently located little shop that smelled of cinnamon and cumin, the relocated co-op is now larger than anything I shop at in Brooklyn, with powerful fluorescent lights and a staff of young people who are clearly not volunteers.
I’ve spent little time in near Minnesota. Or Minnesota at all, for that matter. So close and yet, all I know is the apple stand in La Crescent; my last visit to Minneapolis was more than 15 years ago. I guess dad was driving south, because the river was on the left. In Wisconsin, it would be on your right. Going south. With a train trestle and marsh grasses and a limestone swell on the other side. We turned onto one smaller road after another, mom wondering out loud what was the fire number of what could be best described as Liz’s driveway. Dad pointed out a bald eagle, with the frustrated “look where my finger’s pointing” that I remember so well from childhood. (Note to parents: where your finger is pointing hinges very much on where the eyes are set that are looking at it. That is, you and a five-year-old have a much different idea of where that finger is pointing.) As the roads narrowed and became gravel, our elevation grew, until the tree line dropped away and the sky opened up like Montana.
Una the German Shepard was the first to greet us, escorting us loudly to the outbuilding we could only assume was Joel’s workshop. The door opened easily on its hinges, and there we were, broadside to a glorious cherrywood grand, at the helm of which sat my last piano teacher, Dorinda, pulling off a flawless Chopin nocturne. Liz and Joel’s eldest child, Sadie, sat nearby, looking like something out of an old master, with her serene oval face, calm blue eyes, rippling brown hair down to her waist, and figure like a willow. Dorinda turned the keys over to Sadie, who flawlessly executed some abstract modern piece with all the composure of a child who has never known failure (although I’m sure she has, she must have, she’s nearly 15, for crying out loud). And then we repaired to the kitchen for tea.
But not before passing the possum, a return guest who seems to live only to amuse the dog. “She just keeps coming back,” Liz said of the creature, which had fallen over and let its tongue loll pinkly out of the side of its mouth. “That doesn’t seem like much of a survival strategy,” I commented. “Maybe not. But it works,” Liz retorted. Una took up her post then, practically standing on the “dead” possum, uttering an occasional “voof.”
I got the tour of the grand farmhouse. Or what was once grand, had faded to less than spectacular, and was returning to, probably surpassing, its former state. Windows all around allowed broad view of the cornfield stubbled countryside, the master bedroom looked like a hotel suite. And the attic, still mostly plywood and ideas, was being built into a bedroom for Sadie, who would probably have two years to enjoy it before trundling off to a narrow dorm room (and, if she’s like me, progressively smaller spaces for the rest of her life). Downstairs in the kitchen, Joel uncorked a bottle of French wine he’d retrieved from the wine cellar (wine cellar?), and we sat and nibbled chocolates and cookies and drank wine the color of sherry that tasted of earth and talked about pianos and composers and the shrinking rooms of divorced people (Dorinda and I have more in common than we did 17 years ago) until the possum stood up again and it was time to be off.
All of what I heard and saw and tasted was spectacular, and yet so quiet, almost taken for granted. I’m trying to understand what was special about this. Here in New York, I’m surrounded by beauty and grandeur, by intelligence and wit. But maybe not so much wisdom. And I never meet teenagers. Ever. I have to go to Jersey for that. Here there is such a buzz and humm, always. I meditate in the morning, sitting on a cushion on the floor of my 120 square foot bedroom trying to ignore the Flatbush traffic, the thrum of helicopters hovering low in the sky. At 6:30 a.m., the only sound I should be able to hear is my own breathing. But that is not the case.
Maybe I can find some silent solace in knowing that high on a ridge in Caledonia is a family with bright children, un-self-consciously plucking out all the right keys before banging out the front door to catch the bus, not to careful to not disturb the possum.
