Memories of My Mother and Shortnin' Bread

My piano teacher at her end of year recital, playing a duet with one of her graduating students

When I was about ten years old my mother took our family's entire tax refund and bought me an old upright piano. I'd been asking to learn to play for awhile, an almost ridiculous request in a family of six kids and never enough money.

She somehow convinced my father to use the money for a piano, in spite of the fact I was the only child who was going to learn. We had one small living room, and I don't know where they moved our console television with the rabbit ears encased in aluminum foil, but that's where we put the behemoth piano. Even moving the piano into our house must have been a feat not easily accomplished, since my father never owned a pickup truck. A family of eight drove a three seater station wagon, always.

Once the piano was in our home, my mother boldly asked the neighborhood piano teacher, Mrs. Wiggins, to give me lessons our family could not afford to pay for. Instead, while she was teaching other students, I would change bedding, sweep and mop and do dishes, then I would get a turn at the bench.

Looking back, it's so very doubtful I did a worthy job of cleaning her home, yet she agreed to this arrangement. For two years I walked one block down the street, and had a lesson with Mrs. Wiggins. I don't remember a lot about her, except she had blonde hair and wore horn rimmed glasses, and her little boy was sickly.

Mrs. Wiggins had only one caveat - if you took lessons, you performed at the end-of-school-year piano recital, at the little red brick Baptist church around the corner. On the stage. Where the pianist played every single week. I'd only been on that stage a couple of times, and it had been an overwhelming deer-in-headlights experience (other stories for other days).

I don't remember what I wore or who came to hear me play the day of the recital. I do remember Mrs. Wiggins calling my name, and walking up to the front, sitting down at the bench and pretending a sea of faces wasn't staring at me, waiting.

We probably had to perform two pieces; if so, the first has slipped into oblivion. I have no recollection. What I do still recall crystal clear, fifty two or so years ago, was sitting down on that skinny wooden bench, and beginning to play Shortnin' Bread. Mama's little baby loves shortnin' shortnin'.... And somewhere in the middle of it all, the black marks on the page began to swirl and twirl and I was completely frozen by the fear of all those eyes trained on me.

I was SO lost there was no finding the right place, at least in my mind. So instead I began to improvise, play chords and scales up and down the keyboard, until finally I felt I'd played long enough that the piece needed to end, so I ran my fingers up the keys, where I suspect I ended in a tinny sounding high C or so.

I stood up from the bench, turned and curtsied, because that's what good southern girls do after a piano recital, whether you've played to perfection or massacred your piece, then I walked back to the pew, eyes looking down at the floor, and slid in beside my mother.

I'm confident everyone in that little church knew what Shortnin' Bread should sound like, and that I had somehow diverted from the original. I'm sure Mrs. Wiggins realized when I lost my way, and the notes went wonky, that there was no going back.

She never said a critical word to me about my playing; rather, she told me I'd done a grand job.

So today, fifty plus years later, I take weekly piano lessons from the dearest of women, a former elementary school music teacher, who puts so much more into my lesson than my fee could cover. And she doesn't require her few adult students to participate in the end of year ritual. But I go and sit, and listen, and applaud her other, fifty years younger students at the end of every year of lessons, to honor all those teachers out there who put so much more into teaching than they will ever recoup, in fees or even in ability of their students usually.

Mrs. Wiggins' little boy died of leukemia while I was still living down the street; he was about four years old and I was just a little girl so I didn't understand what she was surely going through. Now, all grown up and exempt from piano recitals, but still playing, I understand that the music and those little warm bodies climbing up to sit next to her on the bench was likely salve for her hurting soul.

I've bought a copy of the sheet music for Shortnin' Bread, and this summer, while my lessons are on hold, I plan to learn to play it, to honor my mother, who went to such lengths to buy me a piano, and find a way for me to have lessons we could not afford; for my current dear teacher who has played through her own losses in life, and for Mrs. Wiggins and the little boy who no longer sat by her side.