Music for the First Year

Photo Credit: Joan Wilson. Photo is of me at the piano with my oldest son, 9 months old at the time.

Like many of us during the pandemic, the extra time at home shifted my attention. I found myself sitting down at the piano more and more often in comparison to before.

At first, it was all Scott Joplin, his lesser known rags, not Maple Leaf or The Entertainer (the notorious ice cream truck tune). My initial response to the pandemic was to make my house sound like a carnival, a show, a celebration to counter the uncertainty and anxiety that left me panicked and struggling to breathe after my first masked outing to the grocery store, some two weeks into our sheltering-in-place process. So many shelves bare, my panic heightened by a high grocery bill and the goal of not shopping again for weeks.

Joplin was Spring (the first Spring, anyway). The next season of the pandemic was one of nostalgia — maybe because we were moving, maybe because of my concerns for my parents; the fragility of life laid bare as friends lost their parents, uncles, aunts, etc. to COVID. I pulled out my Harry Chapin songbook, circling past the radio hit Cat’s Cradle, focusing instead on Mr. Tanner, Better Place to Be, Taxi, songs that carried me back to my childhood, to countless hours spent in a car or van for family road trips, pilgrimages back to the Midwest and my birthplace from deep in the heart of Texas.