The piano lady is no longer Mrs. Anderson

So after grocery shopping for the first time in three weeks, I came home to a typical e-mail from my mother.

As I'm a lucky kid whose parents still feed her, and because my so-called permanent residences typically change annually, my bills are send to my parents' address. Mom's always great about letting me know what kind of money I've spent.

It went something like this:

Hi Kelsey,

How was your day? I'm paying bills.

She then interjects that $24.99 is due to my credit card account.

And closes with:

Love,
Mom


But, it was her post script that prompted me to write:

The piano lady says hi! She's not Mrs. Anderson anymore.

My mother must have seen her in the dental office. With a father as a dentist and a mother a hygienist, I typically both brush and floss and receive greetings through the grapevine. But if she's not Mrs. Anderson, who is she?


Such a statement aptly jogs the memory: the soft hearted woman in whose basement I'd spent nearly all my childhood Monday afternoons is no longer the same. Unlike my mother's former teacher, she never hit my knuckles when I stuck a G instead of a C, and never reprimanded me when I'd blunder through a piece of music I'd obviously not practiced. When I started at six, I played by ear and learned staff lines and key signatures as an afterthought. I memorized and performed competition pieces and played a duet on Northrop's stage in an honors concert at eight. But by sixteen, I was enjoying her company during my hour long lessons more than I wanted to learn Bach's piceces in my Suzuki classics. She'd adjust her glasses beneath her salt and pepper hair as I painstakingly picked through a piece, before gently indicating it could use some work. But she never squirmed or stopped me; her patience was probably a direct gift from God. She drank warm, red juice from coffee mugs and loved her cats and her baby grand. She encouraged me to play more jazz and embellish the pieces on which I was working. And I did. I'd add new syncopation in a rift of eighth notes, fermatas as the bass line plunked away... It was the only thing I ever practiced in those last few years of lessons.

But it's amazing the kind of bubble that surrounds you as a child. You learn piano theories, while theories of love aren't holding true. Not that love has ever been scientific. As it turns out, gentle Mrs. Anderson had been verbally abused by her husband for years and finally broke away during the last. How do you enter someone's home 52 times in a year for ten years and have an indication of her pain? Perhaps you're allowed naivete when you're sixteen, but why should that be an excuse for tunnel vision?

Pistachios and Public Speaking.

Back in July, my grandmother called me and asked me - as I was still afresh from Guatemala - if I would like to be the January speaker for the St. Cloud Reading Room Society. Being that Gram is one of my best friends and she is head of the Speakers Committee, I obliged and only learned later I would receieve a stipend for my efforts. But as it turns out, this women's society has been around for some 100 years and made some big changes in the history of the little town in which I grew up. They began with a book collection for women near the end of the Civil War. While most would now consider St. Cloud the size of a suburb (and to this there may be relevance as it's almost entirely filled with things like Barnes and Noble and Starbucks), the local grocery chains prevail. Still, the downtown area is a far cry from the booming place it was back in the 20s. The origianl 44 women promoted literature among themselves, and Andrew Carnegie donated some $25,000 to the buildling of the St. Cloud public library that housed even a Shakespeare club in the late 19th century. While the original buildling was replaced in 1979, these women are responsible for the fact that I had a library in which to read when I was a kid. Reading, and well, old apple computers with word munchers.

A few weeks ago, I receieved an official letter signed, "Sincerely Yours, Helen Catton" in the mail. It cordially thanked me and breifly explained the meeting. The trouble now, is that January 10th is Thursday, and I'm alloted 45 minutes to speak and answer questions. And I'm the granddaugther of one of the leading ladies.

And I don't know what the hell I want to talk about.

I tend to let public speaking events fly slightly off the cuff - to write a "speech" for myself would be an excruciatingly long endeavor. And I supposed my casual attitude toward speaking events is probably the remnants of the speechie I was in High School. (I guess least 4th place in the State meet still does something for me, right?) This time - due to the duration of the talk - I feel like I should have some kind of direction. At the moment, though, I seem to have only directed my pacing between my desk and my kitchen counter, where I've opened a bag of pistachios - hoping the salt will do something more than make me thirsty.

But once I'm down to the nubby shells that I couldn't possibly pry open with my bare hands I'll have no other choice than to drink my water or go back to my book.

I'd like to be effective in my speaking as Tracy Kidder is writing. I'm reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, and while it's about Tuberculosis in Haiti, I feel like it's also about Guatemala. Kidder has the cabaility to infuse a reader with the feeling of traveling in a packed pickup through the mountains and their desolate, desperate confines. Babies living in shacks with TB are babies in Guatemala, malnourished and surviving on coffee because a mother won't lactate. Kidder underwhelms the nature of what he writes to effectively allow the reader to meet his text with his or her own sentiment. He is fantastic - and does well, what I seem to garble about Guatemala in my own writing.

Mostly I want to tell stories to these women. I guess it's time to begin scouring the journals again. I'm not out to hound some kind of message, but to talk about another place I tend to call home.