music in the mornings

i find myself thinking about my daddy a lot lately. i wake up in the mornings with flashes of him and things of the past. i am not sure if it’s a stage of grief or what, but it’s been so good for my soul. today i remembered high school mornings. i could hear my daddy’s voice clearly in my head. i could hear the piano. i began to visualize those early mornings when i was in high school being awakened by his piano playing, loudly. it was always several chords back and forth and i am sure a part of some song he was “getting up” for the band he played in on the weekends. the music was good, i’m sure, but the timing was really bad for my teenage brain. we had a baby grand piano at the bottom of the stairs in our house. my room was at the top of the stairs, and the tunes thundered upward. daddy was a morning person and a true rhythm and blues man. he was a music snob, really. he was quick to tell us if music we liked was of high quality. he didn’t lightly tap the keys and rarely missed a note; and he would only play songs he deemed “good”. he was in a band his entire life, playing the bass guitar, the organ, keyboard for audiences all over. but in private, at home, he played the baby grand. i think it was for practice, but it never sounded like practice. he could just play by ear. he would work out songs on the piano. i never thought about it much until now, but it was art. it wasn’t hours and hours of practice. it was a few chords here and there and bits and pieces of songs. i took those little ditties for granted all those years. it was part of every day life in our house. i vaguely remember my baby brothers crawling around the piano or accompanying him from time to time with a bang or two. but mostly, i remember the mornings of loud piano playing wafting upward to my slumber. the mornings were reserved for us, daddy and me. of course, at the time, i had no idea those moments were special. my teenage self was annoyed and angry and self-obsessed. those chords thar he threw out so easily and loudly were often accompanied by his words: “amy are you stirring around?” i just remembered that phrase today for the first time in probably forever. “stirring around”. who says that? my daddy, that’s who. he would yell up the stairs, louder and louder each time he asked, until i grumbled a response. i think about his tone, now, and i realize it wasn’t gruff or harsh. it was authoritative with a hint of kindness. i was never “stirring” anything. i was barely moving and barely awake. i hated waking up early when i was a teen, especially to loud thundering music. i would push it off as long as i could as daddy would yell up to me and continue to play that piano until he left for work. he left the outcome of whether i made it out of bed and out the door up to me. he was always on time for his clients and regimented. i was not. but when the piano playing stopped in the mornings, i knew it was dangerously close to school-starting time, so, i always (or almost always) got out of the bed when the music stopped. (sometimes before to stop the noise).

as i look back to youth through my middle-aged haze, i see the sun seeping through the breezeway, the room where the piano sat with my mother’s carefully placed decor around. i see a tunnel of darkness up those steps to my rarely-visited-by-parents 1980’s room, decked with bryan adams and jon bon jovi posters. i think it’s safe to say my musical taste was not the same as my daddy’s at the time.

what a cool memory and a cool house to grow up in. it was a place of self-expression and freedom, i think. the view from here is definitely rosier with hints of clarity. something has shiftied in this mind of mine.

music filled our home always. i never thought much about it until recently, about how unique it was that we had a daddy (my brothers and me) who was always playing music; about how unique it was that my alarm clock was live rock and roll music from a gifted pianist (my own father) on a beautiful baby grand. it wasn’t glamorous or eventful at the time. it was real and loud and even ordinary. isn’t there a saying about beauty in the mundane and how it isn’t recognized at the time. william wordsworth? Ode: Imitation to immortality, maybe? i can’t quite remember.

anyway, my music-loving daddy died 4 years ago. we all got to say goodbye—family, friends, former bandmates. he truly got to have a living visitation. it was a precious and sacred time, but shortly after he died, we began to care for our mother who died 3 years after daddy (last year). her illness and death consumed much of my grief. i am not sure if i even grieved my daddy. maybe that is what is happening now. i am just now remembering things about him that are important. maybe i will always remember things about my parents. i hope so. the piano was an important part of my childhood. it is an important part of my life. it was always there making music in the background. it currently sits in my house. i play it a little, every now and then, but not like he did. he had the talent. i thought about selling that piano not to long ago. i need the money, but i think i need the music more. i’ll keep the piano, for now anyway.

my daddy and i had a complicated relationship. i never thought he liked me much. i didn’t think we had much in common. he told me once that i was not a “daddy’s little girl” kind of girl. i took that as an insult at the time, but i don’t think he meant it that way. i think he meant i was independent and bossy and maybe even complex. i fought back. i stood up. i had flair. about a week before he died, i asked him what he liked best about me, he said he liked me best when i was a smart ass like my mother. i smiled when he said that. in the end, i think i am beginning to understand him.

in the mornings, when he would play the piano loudly, i would yell down to him to stop playing. i screamed. i was so mad and grumpy. i hated the interruption. i wanted sleep. it was his way of connecting. and my yelling could have been my way of rejecting or protesting or expressing. music was his way. he liked the resistance from me. he liked the annoyance. he did not know that i needed him in other ways. i didn’t know it either. we misunderstood each other easily and often. i never really felt protected by him or even knew that he really cared. he did care though. i think he thought i had it together. he thought girls just came prepackaged with love and self-esteem and worth. he did not know that he contributed to that development. he did not know that i needed reassurance from him. i blamed him for a long time for my inability to connect with the right men, for my inability to partner with a man. i blamed him for my attraction to the emotionally unavailable man. you know the drill—little girl not feeling love from her father looking for love in all the wrong places. a tale as old as time.

daddy did not mean to not connect with me emotionally. he did not know what to do. he just played the music. he did what he was good at. he provided for me. he cooked for me. and more often than not gave me whatever i wanted materially. he was selfish in some ways and immature in other ways, and i did not fully get him. but he liked waking me up in the mornings with the piano. it was a way he could parent me. i did not realize that until now.

i hope daddy is playing the piano in heaven. i hope he gets to be the alarm clock for angels. i hope he still gets to be a part of music. he loved it so much, and it was something that he understood. i hope he knows how loved he is. i hope he knows how much he taught me and still teaches me, even now. surely he does. i hope he knows how grateful i am for the creative ways we were parented. i hope he knows he was the perfect daddy for me. i hope he knows that i know that music in the mornings was more than just him annoying me or waking me up. music in the mornings was love. and i miss it.