Music, Music Teachers, and Amazing Gifts

My piano teacher has the most amazing house. It is really more of a tiny house tacked onto a massive music room, which contains two full sized grand pianos and a massive organ. How she got them through the normal sized door I haven’t yet worked out. Maybe they built the room around the instruments? And added to that, she also owns two upright pianos, one in her shed, and one in her study. You can tell, just by looking at it, that a music teacher lives there.

Recently she announced that she was going to sell one of her upright pianos. After all, what use does one person have for four pianos, even when she is a piano teacher? After her husband, my former piano teacher, died last year, there just weren’t enough people to use them enough. It was perfectly understandable that she would sell one, though it was a pity. In my house we play on an electric piano, so her pianos are a real treat to play on every week at our lessons.

One day, she said, suddenly and unexpectedly, that she was going to give us the piano she had been planning to sell. My mouth dropped open. Give us a piano? Give us a PIANO? A piano is not something that you give away like that, not to my mind.

“You need a proper piano to play,” she said. “And Ian would have wanted you to have it too.”

I think about that, and I have to admit, it’s the sort of generous thing that both my teacher and her husband, Ian, would do. They’ve given us so much over the past few years, such as free piano lessons that we could never have afforded. To give us a piano is a big thing, and something I still can’t wrap my head around properly.

Soon the piano removalists are going to move the piano from my teacher’s house to ours. Soon the big, shiny, black piano will be sitting in our family room, it’s smooth white keys inviting me to sit down and press them, making beautiful music. I can still hardly believe how generous my teachers, both of them, have been. How could I deserve such a generous and unexpected gift?