Sunday Essay: On the Light in the Window, and Participating in the Beautiful

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, November 29^th. It is the 20^th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On East 6^th, When It All Comes Back

There are beautiful things in this world. Beautiful scenes. Beautiful moments. Beautiful places. There are times when the totality of the surroundings are, together, beautiful—the sights, the sounds, the feeling of the air on one’s clothing and skin. There’s probably a word for this in painting, or in photography—the paintings or photos that bring the non-visual bits to life. Nighthawks comes to mind. Instagrams of the Oregon coast come to mind. An enchanting thing about these moments, these scenes, these slices of reality, is that they can be both ordinary and spectacular. They can be a quiet, well-lit diner. They can be a majestic meeting between rocks and sea.

I grew up on a busy street. Lake Avenue is two lanes wide. Its speed limit is 30 miles per hour. It spans a mile or two through the old part of Lakewood, connecting Route 14—Crystal Lake’s commercial thoroughfare—to the subdivisions that make up the bulk of the city’s newer (always a relative term) population. Our old house sat close to Lake Avenue, a light gray Cape Cod with blue shutters, set apart first from the road by a narrow front lawn and later by my mother’s garden, which was enclosed by white picket and lattice fence and featured a softly spilling stone fountain at its center. The front of the house held the living room, a sitting room with a great big beautiful china cabinet and a piano—a light brown, standup piano set against the west wall. My mother bought the instrument in Kansas City when she was fresh out of Iowa State, working for Procter & Gamble at the soap factory where she met my dad. It’s a nice thing, and it now looks out at the lake in a little sunroom in my parents’ new house, which is not new, or even new to them anymore, but is still the new house in that it is not the old house. The old house is the one back on Lake Avenue.

Growing up, all three of us boys took piano lessons. We’d walk or ride our bikes down Richmond Lane to Mrs. Wedel’s house, I think most often on Monday night, after school. As an often timid elementary schooler with poor balance who therefore hated riding his bike, I’d pretend I was on some campaign in the worlds of Narnia on my walks there and back, especially in the darker times of winter, when the sun set well before five. Those years, we’d practice before school, Mom setting a timer for what I’d guess was fifteen minutes on the clock on the stove. In middle school, I’d practice sparingly, but in longer sessions, a few nights a week, with no timer to liberate me at session’s end. By high school, practice was not happening, and the lessons stopped, but in one of my final years, Mrs. Wedel taught me the basics of chord progressions, which allowed me to crudely improvise and write some simple, mostly repetitive songs. This was a great gift to a lonely boy on the front end of his teenage years.

Being the youngest child, I was the one most frequently home alone. I didn’t mind this. This was not the bad loneliness. It was a release, in a lot of ways. Especially as high school dawned, in those first couple years when the brothers were gone at college or soon on their way and my parents, suddenly having a lot less child-rearing to do, were doing more things for the fun of them, I found myself often home alone at night. Self-conscious, deep in my own head, and—like many high school students with invested families—mildly scrutinized, it was a relief to have these hours alone in the house. The house was quiet. No one wanted anything from me. I could do as I pleased.

A piano makes its presence known in a house. It’s a communal thing, something people gather around. It’s a casual thing, not requiring much in the way of warming up or setting up or cooling down. It’s loud, and the real thing doesn’t allow for headphones, so in an old house with hardwood floors, it makes the whole building ring. When someone is playing a piano in a house of a reasonable size, everyone knows it. There’s some life being fed in through the thing.

When not alone, I didn’t love this about the piano. I didn’t love that everyone could hear me play. Feeling exposed already, this was a particularly vulnerable act, playing pop or piano rock from songbooks or, most vulnerably, improvising and writing those first songs of my own. I often didn’t like to play when others were in the house. I wanted to play the piano for myself, and for the house, and in a rather indirect way—not so much as an audience but rather as a companion—for God. And so, on those nights alone, I would enter the living room, turn the light on atop the piano, and play, and sing, and let it out, unencumbered.

It’s a curious thing, music, as all art is when one drills down upon it. It serves little purpose biologically, at least in the way of survival or reproduction. And yet it’s so present in our world, in all our worlds, in all our little, personal, interconnected worlds. Few among us do not deal with music, and while its importance ranges from person to person, it stirs almost all of us in some way, amplifying emotions and altering emotions and helping us more clearly feel the things we feel, putting words to the things that lack words, hitting our souls with the things that make them ring like gongs. Music can be exultant. It can be forlorn. It can be exhausted, enchanted, brutal, graceful. It can soar. It can grind. It can hide, quietly, a still, small voice. Often, it does all these things at once, or at least a great many of them. It did quite a lot on those nights I spent alone in the living room, playing the piano with God. In those moments, I was free to feel how I felt. I was free to bash those feelings out on black and white keys. I was free to sing those feelings, to yell those feelings, to just-more-than-whisper those feelings in the pianissimo moments of my figuring-it-out heart.

There was an irony here, though, too. Because that living room was very visible. And gradually, after enough kids at school mentioned they’d seen me playing the piano in my living room, as they drove by down Lake Avenue, I realized I was on a little stage.

Of course, it was a protected stage. There was the garden, and the fence, and the prairie grasses in front of it. No sound could reach passersby, and because I felt unencumbered, I presumably looked unencumbered, which likely made me look as though I were better at the thing than I was. And yet, it was a stage, and I sat upon it, and there I was, playing the piano, and for some reason—perhaps because it had become such a sacred space in those moments, or because my exultation was genuine, or because the kids who mentioned it generally said it in a nice way—I didn’t mind being seen. I didn’t mind being on stage.

I don’t have anything grand to say about this experience. I don’t think there’s anything grand to say about it. There isn’t anything grand to say about a lot of things. I liked to play the piano on nights I spent home alone in high school. It was liberating. It was comforting. This is all. But there’s that thing about beauty, and it charms me now and then when I think back to those evenings.

On those nights, I was participating in the beautiful. And I knew it. I knew, somewhere in my heart, that at least to me, there was something beautiful about a kid with a fuzzy buzzcut and little scabs where he’d picked too much at his zits sitting down at a piano, behind prairie grass and white wooden fence and fountain and garden and window, and rejoicing. Rejoicing as the sky turned red above him, and the soft fall air cooled. Rejoicing on the winter nights when his voice was shot and he resurrected it sip by sip from a mug of ginger tea fresh out of the microwave. Rejoicing in the spring, when the clouds were dark gray and there was no joy being felt, but the act of singing out the rage and the despair made the whole thing joyful in a grueling way—a satisfying, grueling way.

Time was described to me once as a tapestry, always there, stretched out through eternity in all directions, with the scenes of our world ordered along it, ourselves only presently seeing the place on the tapestry we presently occupy. I may have written of this before. If this is true—and I believe it is—it’s comforting to know that there’s a place somewhere back along the tapestry where I am there at the piano, participating in the beautiful. There, the sun has just set. There, the sky is red. There, the prairie grasses softly bob, and the fence stands rock still, and the fountain spills itself down upon its feet. There, there’s a boy at the piano. There, there are cars rushing past. There, there’s a light in the window. And ever that light will shine.

Next week’s essay: On Christmastime, Which Lifts Us from Ourselves