Music and Memories

Music is the third language in our household: as we haul our musical instruments around the world, we riff off the past and present.

This past July, my daughter and I visited dear friends in the magnificent Baroque town of Noto in Sicily. One night, we went out to dinner at Trattoria Al Buco in front of the church of San Francesco d’Assisi all’Immacolata. That night, the city’s churches glowed in a honey light, kids slurped granita, grandparents devoured cannoli. The city was exquisitely illuminated as if it were a summer advent calendar, with life noisily popping out of its windows, restaurants and churches. As locals strolled on the main drag, scents of after-sun creams mixed with grilled octopus filled the air. Far from the torrid heat of Rome, Noto twinkled, showcasing an Italian summer at its best.

Just as we were diving into a delicious plate of cavatelli freschi alla norma, a musician set up a microphone on the steps of the church in front of us, plugged in his guitar to an amplifier, and began his one-man show. He sang familiar pop songs, both in English and in Italian, and his audience often chimed in at the chorus.

At a certain point, my daughter, Sofia, wordlessly rose from her seat at the table, alone, as if hypnotized, leaving her 14-year-old pal behind. She silently slinked up the church steps, and seated herself about five rows behind the young musician. With each song performed, she inched her way down the steps until she sat next to him.

Shoulder to shoulder with her, he turned and smiled. He seemed tickled by her lack of inhibition and the magnetism of music that had lured her to him.

From afar, I watched their body language, and gathered afterwards that she told him that she also played the guitar. He took the strap off his shoulder, ready to place it over hers to let her play. She was all set to try but then saw that his was a left-handed guitar, and, right-handed, she didn’t know how to play his.

He asked her if she could sing. She shrugged her shoulders, and nodded, and the next thing I knew, she was singing in front of all of us, as he accompanied her on the guitar. They performed Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” At the end of the solo, the restaurant audience and wandering bystanders applauded, mesmerized by her nonchalance in performing.

As we move around the world, music is the third language in our household that unites us. It lures my children to a world of familiar melodies, harmonies, and, in some cases, cacophonies. Over the years, they have each toyed with a variety of musical instruments. After a short-lived affair with the piano, my daughter plays the guitar, and covets the gorgeous Taylor that her godfather gave her. After playing the saxophone and the mandolin, my son now tinkers on the piano, which he is teaching himself through YouTube. During rough transitions and after international moves, music has sustained us, always connecting us to formative places, often resurrecting the past within the present, and helping us settle into new lands.

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Growing up, I thought all families had a piano in their living room as we did. Music resonated throughout my childhood in Christmas carols or Thanksgiving hymns belted out by crooners around our grand piano. Sunday afternoons often ended with my father mastering Mozart or my mother jazzing Joplin. Piano music always lingered around our house like the friendly houseguest that spiced up cocktail parties.

Every time I see a piano, a magnetic force draws me to it, luring me to play when no one is looking or, better yet, when no one is listening. I don’t play terribly well but I love the sound and the memories that my small repertoire stirs within me.

When my husband and I first met, I was intrigued by the grand piano in his parents’ living room in Rome. Home at last, I thought, even though I was miles away from my own in New York.

At meals with my future in-laws in Rome, as a 25-year-old, I panicked at the lightening speed in which they conversed in Italian. I smiled, I blushed, and nodded capisco, capisco when it was actually niente, niente that I understood. I slaughtered the subjunctive, and pummeled past participles. Italian lunches left me with sweaty palms and indigestion.

In addition to my husband, the family Steinway was my other ally in the living room. No one played it, yet everyone spoke nostalgically about the piano concerts which my husband’s grandfather, a former Italian Ambassador to the United States, had starred in and hosted at the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC during the Kennedy era.

Sheet music spilled out of his piano bench like laundry stuffed in a hamper. Opening it was like reading a page from his diary. A secret language that only he and I understood. Forget the Italian, here was the music that made me feel at home.

When my husband’s mother first encouraged me to play this grand piano, I was terrified. I hadn’t had an audience in years, and I couldn’t possibly compete with its former performer.

But what I wasn’t able to express in my broken Italian, I could convey through music. Relieved no longer to have to speak the language I was struggling to learn, I resorted to one I knew. Music showed up in the form of that old friend that used to hang around at home.

My affinity towards this particular piano of my husband’s grandfather added more than music to my life — it connected me to him. Playing his piano felt like playing along with him in entertaining, albeit in broken tongues. Every time I played, I felt him there in the Roman living room. He was the Italian who had entertained numerous Americans. I was the American playing in his former Italian home. We entertained others in a duet together.

About fifteen years ago, my in-laws decided to get rid of their family Steinway, and sell it because no one played it. I had never believed that the piano would actually leave their Roman apartment where it had gathered dust for many years after its American chapter. I had imagined that its trip on a freight ship from Washington, DC to Rome would anchor it to Italy. Sentimentally, I had also hoped that the family heirloom and prized possession of my husband’s grandfather would one day be mine. The love for and presence of a piano in a family home was something that both of our families shared. Although my in-laws kindly asked us if we wanted to keep it, I couldn’t imagine hauling a grand piano around the world in international moves every four years. Selling it made practical sense. Reluctantly, we let it go.

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In 2010, shortly after we moved into our new home in Israel, I opened our front door to a deliveryman who told me he had an upright piano in his truck. Wrong address, I mumbled. When he showed me the delivery form, I recognized my husband’s signature over indecipherable scribbles of Hebrew.

If I couldn’t have his grandfather’s piano, my husband later told me, then I should have my own. Following our move to the Middle East, I was more homesick than ever. My husband knew that a piano could make our house feel like a home. The first time I played my piano, my son asked me why I was crying.

My neighbor in Israel, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, gave me piano lessons. In between scales, she told me stories about her aging mother whose wrist bears an Auschwitz tattoo. She used to tell me how music comforted her, blocking out the minor, gloomy chords that haunted her past. Before we left Israel, she played Christmas carols at my father’s 70th birthday party in Tel Aviv while our American and Italian families sang along. I imagined my husband’s grandfather would have cheered at the bridging of all worlds through the soft diplomacy of music.

As toddlers growing up in Israel, my children sat at my feet drawing or playing Lego while I practiced scales, Chopin, Mozart and movie themes. They helped me dust the keys. My daughter, after a couple of years of piano lessons, used to place her small hands next to mind, and insist we play together.

Our piano has now traveled from Tel Aviv to Rome to San Francisco and back again to Rome, where it warms up our living room. I occasionally accompany my daughter on it as she strums the guitar and sings. My teenage son recently started teaching himself the piano, obsessively playing the movie theme to Interstellar with some Erik Satie and Billy Joel on the side. Both are as drawn to their instruments as I am to a piano. By now, each of their repertoires is far more impressive than my own.

As they improvise on their instruments, I feel my husband’s late grandfather in our salotto, tapping his foot to the beat of his Italian-American great-grandchildren writing their own musical chapters.

My children’s Italian grandfather now tears up whenever he hears either of them play. With every breath I take, I do, too.