Reading | Akiko Busch’s “Grand Piano”

Reflection:

I wrote this short piece because I was thinking about the powerful role memory plays in our experience of place. And how memory—as elusive and ephemeral as it is—can also fix certain episodes, incidents of our lives in definitive and decisive and absolute ways. This is interesting to me. I think we are formed by place much more than we generally acknowledge. And how we remember place is part of this. There often seems to be this vast space between the world as it may be and the way it rests in recall and imagination. I wanted to explore that space.

Audio Transcript:

When I was in elementary school, my parents had the idea that I shoulder learn to plau the piano. To that end, they installed a grand piano that had belonged to my grandmother in a small room in the back of the barn. Becuase the room was not heated in the winter, they also put a small electric heater in the room, and I would go out there on weekday afternoons to practice.

Loovking back on this, I know it is inconveivable that it ever happened. It would have been impossible to move a grand piano through the series of small doors leading to that little room in the back of the barn. Doors and walls would have had to have been removed, and this never happened either. But I am just as sure it was not an upright piano because I remember exactly how the light falling through the window illuminated the thin blanket of dust covering the vast lid of the grand piano. I had no ear, my fingers were cold, the dust in the back room made me sneeze, and even an exercise so simple as practicing the scales produces a sound that was almost impossible to identify. So maybe, I think, it was the gargantuan task of trying to learn to play this piano that caused me to so magnify its size; and that occasioned me to translate my monumental efforts into a monumental instrument.

I know that places exist in memory almost entirely differently than they exist in the material world. And that the houses in our recall are furnished not only with pianos that can move through walls, but floorboards that shift, light that adjusts magically, windows that alter their position. I am certain that the stone path leading to our front door in the house we live in today is original to the old farmhouse, but my husband swears to laying down the stones himself, placing them just so.

Like the keys of the piano have come to reflect octaves of fabulism, the arrangement of stones manages to reflect different sequences of conviction. Perhaps I associate the path with some kind of domestic history or legacy that matters to me, while in my husband’s mind it is connected with the way we laid out our own route to the house. What seems certain either way is that the tenacity of the material world is nothing when it comes up against the tenacity of human memory.