I had a couple frightening run-ins with pianos when I was four or five—not frightening to me, mind you. I was the scary one!  

The first time, my mom and I were dispatched to go pick up my Aunt Mettie, who was probably 80 at the time, at her house and bring her to a family dinner. When we got to her house, my mom could hear her banging away on the piano. We knocked and knocked at the door, but she clearly couldn’t hear us, and she never stopped long enough for us to get a knock in edgewise.

Anxious that we were missing dinner, my mom creaked open the door and told me to go in and get her, figuring that (1) I was small, and thus noisy, and (2) a small human would give the poor old lady less of a heart attack by suddenly materializing amid the music. 

Except I didn’t really understand the assignment. What I should have done was made a racket going the long way around and approach her from the front, so she’d see me coming. But I was under the impression that time was of the essence. So I made a beeline for her, moving silently across thick pile carpets and coming up behind her. She literally never heard me coming, and she screamed and jumped about jumped a mile when I tapped her on the shoulder. I screamed and jumped about a mile because her reaction had frightened me. My mom came on the run—ready to call an ambulance or drive us both to a hospital, I suppose.

It says a lot about Aunt Mettie that she was one of maybe three adults in my life at that time who generated zero fear in me of getting yelled at. And she didn’t yell at me for that stunt, either, although anyone else would have and she probably should have. After she started breathing again, she laughed and said it was her own fault for losing track of time, and we all got in the car and went merrily off to dinner, where Aunt Mettie got a lot of mileage out of her “ghost” story. 

The second time I got in trouble might have been the same trip, or it might have been a little later.  My great-grandparents had a farm house where they lived in summer and a house in town where they lived in winter and where my grandma indulged her society side and threw lunches and so on. The town house had a beautiful baby grand piano. I don’t think I ever heard my grandmother play it, but I had watched my dad run his fingers gently over the keyboard a couple times, and I knew the basics of how the keys made noise and the papers on in the piano bench told you which keys to push. Because he never actually sat down and played, I sort of absorbed that I wasn’t supposed to touch it either, even though nobody ever directly instructed me to keep my paws to myself. So I would walk by that big, gleaming piece of furniture and just wonder about it.

For reasons I can’t recall now, my mom and I were spending the night at the town house by ourselves. My mom had sent me to bed, but I wasn’t sleepy. So when I heard her go into the bathroom and start the shower, I hopped out of bed, slipped downstairs, and helped myself to the piano. I put a piece of sheet music that I didn’t know how to read up on the music desk, plopped my little butt on the bench, and played the hell out of that song, whatever it was. Sweet and Low, maybe.

In the words of Ferris Bueller: Never had one lesson!

I thought I was doing the same thing as my father and barely touching the keys, so that my mom wouldn’t hear me and I wouldn’t get in trouble. Except I was young and had no idea how long showers took—I’m not even sure I comprehended that they were shorter than baths. So the next thing I know, my mom pops up out of nowhere and sort of growls in a scary, low voice, “What do you think you are doing?”

It was Aunt Mettie all over again. I shot straight up in the air like a cat and shrieked. My mom took a half step back at my reaction but then laughed and sent me off to bed with a swat and a fairly laid-back warning to leave that thing alone.

What I didn’t know until years later was that I had scared the bejeebers out of her first. From her view, she was done for the night: I was asleep, we were alone in the house, all was snug and cozy, and she was freshly showered and ready to pass out. So when she turned off the water in the shower and heard weird noises from downstairs, in this house that wasn’t hers, with nobody else around and no idea where Grandpa kept any weapons … she had a bit of jolt. So she’s standing there, naked and dripping … and listening. She cracks open the bathroom door and realizes it’s the piano—who would break into a house and play the damn piano? Although the Manson family had broken into houses and just crawled around on the floor before they actually killed anyone, so who could say? She was on her way to a right tizzy as she toweled off and looked for a bat or a toilet plunger or anything that would get her to the kitchen and a knife, when she realized that the music … was … not exactly music. It was just banging on the keys. By that time, she was in her bathrobe, and she poked her head in my room and saw my bed was empty.  Ah hah, thinks my mom. I’ll show her.

And she did.

Years later, that piano moved into our house. I took two years of lessons and never got very good. My dad taught himself a bunch of blues and jazz riffs and was an absolutely joy to listen to for years. He also wrote snarky songs about his job and friends in the vein of Tom Lehrer and was popular at parties after a few scotch-and-waters. Not exactly Sweet and Low, but that piano had a good life. It’s in my mom’s house now, waiting for someone to pick it up again. Never say never. I’ll retire soon and maybe that will be my hobby. But I’ll never be as lyrically funny as my dad.