From the view out of the batter’s box, I always looked up to the pitcher’s mound and feared I was the lesser man.  In this battle we engaged, his leading the field of play, I worried that he was craftier or stronger, or that the people watching me would be better served if this over with faster.  It was no strange occurrence for me to watch three gut strikes, then go sit back down, politely and unshaken.

My father worked with me until my hitting mechanics were fluid and pristine.  I lifted weights religiously to bulk up.  On a windy enough day in the 7th grade I could send a ball out of the yard, the full 355′ of Elmer Kelley Stadium.  But only if I were facing a pitching machine or the coach.  I made the high school Junior Varsity though I never swung the bat against a live arm.  It was a temperament problem.  My instincts were to not get hit by an 80mph projectile, to get the situation over, and to disappear into reflection.  Returning to my seat in the dugout I would wonder what was wrong with me, but I liked baseball even if I had to play it.  I was what you call: a kid.

With the high school season midway, it became common for me to need to do something else at home and not think about baseball.  I don’t remember all the things I probably tried first but I eventually found myself at my mother’s piano, and determined to learn Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.  I’d had three piano teachers growing up, and each one had told my mother the same thing,  ”He could be a fine pianist if he’d decide to be.  But if you can’t make him practice, he shouldn’t continue coming.”

Maple Leaf Rag was a bit ambitious, but it was the reach I was needing.  As children go through well meant activities it takes their own decision if something is to stay.

We were raised in church.  A great big Southern Gospel Church by the interstate, a hunter green metal building you could see for miles.  Around my age the boys stopped running around the gym and were supposed to sit through youth group called “Powerhouse” with the older kids.  There was a band, but Ms. Teresa from big church had to be our piano player.  This was around 1995, and just before the acoustic guitar contemporary church music fashion broke into Kentucky.  We were a gospel church and that meant piano driven, definitionally.  Ms. Teresa was a famous member of The Childress Family, a touring/recording gospel group known everywhere.  Her daughter was a singer and she came over to lead the band: Ms. Teresa, a high school drummer and likewise, a bassist.

To describe how Ms. Teresa plays is tricky.  That kind of music is in the old keys we don’t use anymore: Eb, Ab, and Bb.  When pianists ruled, before Chris Tomlin and his gang, everything was like this.  There was swing, and every word needed it’s own chord.  There were three chord turnarounds and intros to be learned separately.  Most songs included one key change at least, and if an acoustic guitar player had even tried to find a strum pattern he would have just clustered things up and gotten a dirty look from Ms. Teresa.

In big church Mr. Smith played the Hammond C3 right beside Ms. Teresa.  Chip had a set of cherry red Tama drums with fifteen pieces.  Harvey Jett played lead guitar having long ago retired from Black Oak Arkansas in the 70s.  He would walk out to the podium, stand on the carpet with the white dove and point his Stratocaster to the sky.  The choir would raise their hands, Mr. Smith would bring the rotor speed to a boil, and Ms. Teresa would drop the funkiest chord walking you ever heard.  We had church, and that’s just how I was raised.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Powerhouse just yet.  My  comrades and I would come in sweaty from our basketball and look around, mostly at high school girls.  Once when nobody was looking I sat down and played the piano.  Usually everything I knew, the Maple Leaf Rag.  The youth pastor heard me and after that I was a marked man.

Church people eat afterwards, as you know, and once I sat near Ms. Teresa herself.  I had been watching her for some time, really I’d watched all church musicians for as long as I could remember.  My mom grew up playing the piano in a little country Baptist Church and I woke up to the old hymns every Saturday.  She could remember only five of them but she had learned them once as big and full as they had ever been played.  Bigger perhaps, than the Maple Leaf Rag itself.

Ms. Teresa told me that if I were serious she would teach me.  I told her I’d been playing since I was six, I could read music, and I’d had three teachers.  Every one in town in fact, except for Mrs. Myrtle.   I had no interest in recitals, I wanted to play by ear and I wanted to play with the band.

The timing of this coincided with further confusion in my athletic development.  Going into the eight grade, certain expectations are placed on a baseball player.  One of them is swinging the bat.  I played baseball through the afternoon hours until dark.  I’d come home and bang out the chord charts Ms. Teresa had written for me.  Every little improvisation she played, I asked her to write in pencil.  She would never play it twice the same but she had to freeze something in order to teach me.  Most of the chords were spelled out too.  The basic ones I memorized and she continuously explained the relationships, even drew the circles in my notebook.  For something like an Ab 7 #9/ Eb, she would write it out note for note.  I didn’t know what it meant or why it worked but my fingers learned it like anything else.  My binder of songs grew and I meticulously studied her.  I would hold chords and look at them, change them, figure out what what they were doing.  If I moved a finger to an unplayed note and it worked, I remembered that.  If she wrote something in pencil on one song that worked on another, I’d do that.  I played before I went to school in the mornings.  I went in the band room between classes.

Then Ms. Teresa said I was ready to play on stage far far far before I knew that it was true.  Years before it was true.  I wouldn’t be ready until I were at least her age, or not until I could swing the bat at least.

Truthfully, I couldn’t play for the service as soon as she asked me too.  Her method was the worst possible scenario that an insecure, adolescent boy trying to make his way into the realm of teenage acceptance could imagine:  She sat on the end of the piano bench with me.  And when I messed up and froze, which happened often-  she scooted me off.  I’d sit there with my hands in my lap, my side to the kids, and she would lead the band back to the beginning of a verse and give it me again.  Nothing would be more relieving.  Sitting there was the worst.  And so, I learned that playing the fire out of the piano was the only way to not be scooted off, or having my pants pulled down.  I could mess up but I wouldn’t let her know.  I never stopped.  She could scold me later, but she wasn’t going to kick me off.  Then Ms. Teresa left and went back to big church.

I remember, oh I remember, the prayers I would utter from the seat during the pastor’s sermons.  He would always give an alter call and I had to go back up there alone.  I’d pray for God to give the man more words to say.  I would will him, even look at him intently to encourage him: just don’t make me come up there yet.  I’m not ready.  The big kids, cool kids, pretty girls and even guys on the baseball team would see me.  The sound guy would give me a reassuring nod.  I’d double check the first chord and lay it down like a baby.  The silence would break.  Once it was broken I had to play.  And when you want to hide, the more you will play.

No child knows what they want to do.  They only go with what they already do, and slowly events unfold and the world goes around a little and a lot of small choices can mean more than the big decisions sometimes.  By the time I was 15 I broke my leg and spent my freshman year in a wheelchair and then on crutches.  This had been remarkably bad for baseball and better for piano.  We switched churches later and my role as the piano player changed.  I was behind the blasted acoustic guitar and learning those finger fallacies of easy guitar chords- hell to piano players.  I didn’t need my flats anymore or my #5b7 turnaround chords.  For a while I tried to outdrive them but it couldn’t be done.  They had volume knobs.  Soon I resorted to organs and other gizmos invented by piano players trying to cope with the world around them: the modern keyboard.

I bought, traded and sold keyboards like baseball cards until recently.  Now there is an old upright piano against the wall that was headed to the dump.  There’s a box of my old CDs on top of it.  I don’t even play the thing hardly, and most often I pick up my pawn shop Conrad acoustic instead.  Somewhere down the road I joined the blasted club of them.  I guess it’s been about 16 years since I started with Ms. Teresa.  Maybe 23 years since my first piano recital.  I’m a pretty good piano player if anybody’s asking, but I would hope for that by now or something has gone terribly wrong.  A lot of little decisions have gotten me here, trying to make a living off the thing and not even feeling like looking at it most times.  Probably because it’s been such a frustrating go of things and I sometimes wish I’d worked out algebra problems after baseball practice.

I played at church again last night and I haven’t done so since the baby was born.  It felt good, felt right.  I still hide behind the piano, that’s my way.  I know I can make it do anything I want and that’s the best way to hide.  I sing sometimes and that puts me out there on the edge of the seat.  No since in hiding if you’re going to stick your head up at the same time.  I like to write words, and since I play music, songwriting has always had a natural gravitation.  I still have the temperament problem and it’s funny I would choose show business.  I don’t feel like I chose it, I couldn’t have, and that’s the mystery I must sort out.  I’m not of the opinion that the arts, the manual arts, the sciences, the entrepreneurs or the collars of any kind are really any different in their own minds.  We choose a little at a time, and we get where we’ve overall chosen to be.  I guess I wanted to be here with my big, red, solid 500lb struggle of ivory and metal.  Not only with it, but in seclusion with it, up at all hours of the night mixed up in the subtleties of life with it.  If I wanted the lights, truly I suppose I’d have them, but I have the daylight coming up now and that’s the one I want.  I put life to sound, my nature in these notes, beds deep and black, I was made to do this, and if we are instruments at all then we should be grateful for our use no matter what we see it as being.  I am a D flat, thank you for tapping me on the head today.  I will be patient and wait until you need me again, realizing that sometimes I could be the wrong note altogether and other times the note that would make all the difference.