In the basement of my grandpa’s house, there is an old, (old) player piano. It’s nothing fancy – no electric features, it requires brute strength to pump the old pedals through the song. A cabinet of “rollers” sit by the piano – songs popular during my mom’s childhood. The whole kit’n’kaboodle was called “The Rollers.”
As in –
“Let’s go to Grandpa’s and play the rollers.”
It was the centerpiece to every family party, and what the Herzogs lacked in musical ability, we made up for in gusto.
Above the piano was pictures of my grandpa’s kids when they were kids. Uncle Bob with his seventies shag. Aunt Jayne as a little girl. My mom, as a teenager.
It was always the picture of my mom that caught me off gaurd – her hair cut short and feathery – think Peggy Flemming meets Farrah Facet. She sat in a field – non descript and faded to the gold of Ektacolor.
As I pumped that old piano, and sang at the top of my lungs – “Believe it or not, I’m walking on Air” (can you name that tune?)
I thought to myself – “I wonder if my children will ever believe I was a kid.”
Because even faced with the golden proof, I didn’t believe it of my own mother.
Now, here I am, surviving pregnancy number four with the constant companionship of seventies folk music being played on Pandora. John Denver and the Eagles and Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow croon to me in the melodies of my childhood. I know the words to every song, and I find comfort with the familiar.
But I can’t help feeling I am her, a living carnate of my own mother thirty years ago. It makes time and space seem smashed up and unrecognizable as each generation in reality is basically the same.
And so to Olivia, I was young once. I was once you – secure and insecure and sure that my world was as big as it got. Some days those moments seem close at hand, and some days they seem to fall into a place that could hardly have existed. And someday, you will be me, waiting for a child, caring for another. And you will tell your child that you were young once, and she won’t believe you any more than you believe it of me, or I believed it of my own mother. And there is comfort in some things being the same. Like music that flows from one generation to the next, this is the folk song that we pass down.