I sat across the room as Daniel Sittig tuned my piano. He struck a key, struck it again, and again, and again, and turned the handle of a tool that caps a peg on each string. As he turned and struck the key, struck the key and turned, the tone slid upward from flat to the perfect niche it had vacated since the last tuning, and Daniel nodded. After he drew each tone up or down, he would nod or smile, making his auburn goatee move.
"This C sharp" he said, looking at me through the space between the piano and its lid as he struck the note, "is not going to be what the others are. But it's close."
I sat, letting each tone mean something to me -- the ones in perfect tune, the ones a little sharp and a little flat and all their variations as they were drawn into place. That piano sound. I have had it in my head and in my heart since I was old enough to recognize my father sitting on a piano bench. How serendipitous it was the day I watched neighbors moving across the street last month and learned they had a piano they no longer wanted; it was the same week that, 18 years earlier, my father had died.
And so I decided immediately, yes, I would take the Cecils' baby grand at their clearance-sale price and I would learn how to play it. I want to play the songs that make my heart burst when other people play them -- "The Nearness of You," "Little Girl Blue," "I'll Be Seeing You," "I'll Be Around," "But Not For Me," "Laura," "All the Things You Are."
Before he started tuning the piano, Daniel had to repair the whippen assemblies of five keys that had gone silent. He stood where the piano curved, and I stood across from him with my fingers above the lowest bass notes.
"Some people think piano tuners don't exist anymore," Daniel told me as he drilled a new pin into wood. "It's patient work."
I considered this -- patience -- and what I was preparing to endure as a grown-up playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
With both thumbs on middle C, I have been playing little tunes about happy lasses and wishing wells from Book One of a series for adults. The book has numbered notes that correspond with your fingers on the keyboard. I have been playing scales, chords and nonsense jazz, moving my hands over the keyboard rhythmically, just to get the feel of it. My keys have a little arch to them, and a patina, and in my barely furnished high-ceilinged room, the sound is loud and bright. Sometimes, I pretend I can play just to get the feeling before my first official lesson next week. I have watched enough hands over enough piano keys to know what knowing how looks like.
"If I may offer some advice, it would be that, starting today, you enjoy whatever it is you play," Daniel said.
As we talked about music, about our love of Miles Davis and foreign films, Daniel revealed to me that he loves words. "Do you know the origin of 'spittin' image'? It was 'spirit and image,' " said Southern and fast by African Americans, and misheard. Daniel repeated it fast, so that "spirit and" blended together as "spittin' " like a pair of eighth notes in a four-beat measure.
"Words fascinate me. I think if I were starting over, I would study language," he said.
Words -- what they mean, how they express what you mean, how to string them together -- have been the focus of my life.
"If I had it to do over," I said, "I'd have let my grandmother teach me how to play the piano."
All those years when my Mimi, who was conservatory-trained, tried to give me free instruction, I couldn't sit still long enough or imagine what the future might sound like or see the value of difficult lessons. Now, I was looking at the back of the keyboard with all its hammers standing up and the exacting, teensy bits and parts that do not look even 20th century, wondering how long I will have to live to be able to play "Such a Night" a la Dr. John.
After he tuned the piano, Daniel sat and began playing "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square." His playing filled my house and escaped through the screen to the sidewalk, and I was so glad it was he I called of all the tuners my friends suggested.
My piano gives me the chance to reconnect with my father and my grandmother, piano players who imbued me with an intense love of music. When I sit down and pretend I can play, I imagine them guiding me.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
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