AFTER SITTING IN the lobby near the old Steinway Grand Piano for several minutes and pondering what had just happened, I decided to pour my heart out by playing a few songs. I had never had a lesson on the piano, but beginning at the age of sixteen, I began fiddling around with a piano in a small dark piano practice room at Glenbrook North High School that was barely large enough for the piano and the bench. I had been upset about a beautiful tiny girl named Jane Rosene and initially wanted to find a quiet dark place to cry my sorrows away. But while I was asleep with my head in my arms on the piano, I had a dream. It was simple—that I could write a song that would express my feelings for Jane. When I awoke, I started tapping keys, listening to whether when I tapped them they made me feel happy or sad. That part of it was easy, and I realized early on that those notes that I played would always be happy or sad notes.
The hard part was creating a melody or, as I was thinking at the time, a musical story of how I was feeling. I knew what a melody was. I liked music. Instinctively, I knew how a song was structured and balanced. I believed I could write music by osmosis. Even without formal training, I believed I could create a tone poem of what was occurring deep in my soul.
The next hard part was putting chords to the little sequences of melodies I was writing. It was terribly difficult at first. But it came. I forced it to come. There was a logic to it. If I wrote something that didn’t sound right, I eradicated it. But if I put something together that I liked, it sounded as if those notes had existed there for all time just to be put into the exact sequence that I had placed them.
It took me four months to write my first song. When I finished it, it was lovely, powerful, frisky, classical sounding. I named it “For Jane.” I couldn’t wait to play it for her. I was pretty sure the song wouldn’t make her love me; she was already enamored with a handsome young stud who was a national skateboard champion. But I wanted to impress her. I wanted to give her something she had never had. A song of her own, written for her from deep within the heart of somebody who loved her.
We were friends already and I told her one lovely May day that I had written a song for her and I wanted to play it for her. I asked her if I could play it for her in that same piano practice room in which I had written the whole thing in almost absolute darkness. Don’t ask me why I did that. It is probably just something that started that first day and I merely kept it going from a wintry January day to a near end of the school year day in May.
But Jane said no to the dark, tight practice room. “I have a grand piano in my living room at home. Why don’t you come and play it for me there?”
Now, the pressure was really on. Here I was still a pimply faced, relatively awkward kid and Jane Rosene wanted me to come to her home and play for her on a grand piano. I had never played a grand piano. The mere thought of it intimidated me. And what if her mom was around and wanted to hear the song too? And what if her dad was there? Or she had brothers or sisters? Or what if she had friends over and they wanted to listen to the song. And God forbid she asked her boyfriend to come over and listen too. Suddenly, an intimate moment I had wanted to share with Jane in a darkened room had turned into a concert with a possible audience of several people. My God, this was the first song I had ever written. I had wanted it to be for her, not for her whole family and their friends.
For once in my life, fate smiled upon me.
“We could do it tomorrow after school about four o’clock. My mom and dad will still be at work. They don’t get home until 5:30. That will give us plenty of time.”
I was still nervous about brothers and sisters. I asked, “Will anyone else be there? A brother or sister maybe?”
“No, Turf. I’m an only child and we don’t even have a maid so it will just be you and me.”
My confidence came surging back. It was a beautiful song. I wanted to play it only for her. It was a sacred event. My wish, with some key variations, was coming true.
Tomorrow came altogether too quickly. The school day dragged while the nervous pit in my stomach grew. At 3:15, the school bell rang and I was out of the building in a flash. I had to catch a different school bus that day, Jane Rosene’s bus. She lived five miles away from me in a different direction. I hadn’t even anticipated how I would get home from Jane’s. I simply wanted to play my song for her. I would gladly walk the five miles home, practically fly it home if she liked it.
When we got onto the bus, Jane said, “You sit with me today.”
Oh my god, was this really happening? Of course there were numerous curious onlookers wondering first of all what I was doing on that bus, and secondly what I was doing sitting next to the most stunning girl at Glenbrook North, all of Northbrook for that matter. (Although, my mother and my sister ran a close second and third to Jane.)
So Jane decides to stop them all in their tracks with a single sentence said loudly enough that everyone could hear. “We’re going over to my house where Turf’s going to play a song he wrote for me on the piano.”
Here we went again. All anonymity was now gone. The pit in my stomach grew into a canyon of nerves. Now everyone on the bus knew what was going on. In minutes, when kids started arriving home, phone calls would be made and within hours all the cool kids including Dick Whatever-the-heck his name was would know my once hoped for very personal business with Jane.
The Rosene residence was the sixth stop of the route. We got off the bus to a few lighthearted giggles and even a touch of applause. It actually made Jane and me laugh.
In a moment we were inside her enormous home after she first pulled out a large stack of letters from the mailbox. We headed straight for the living room past numerous pieces of lovely art, statues, and a blend of antique and modern furniture, all remarkably compatible.
And there it was—the Steinway Ebony Grand Piano. The centerpiece of the room. The only item on it was a Liberace style sterling silver candelabra adorned with eight unlit pure white candles. This was to be my instrument in a matter of moments.
“Who in your family plays?” I asked her.
“All of us,” she answered. “My mom’s the best. My dad’s real good, too. I’m the least accomplished. I’ve really slacked off the last couple of years because of school and cheerleading. Would you like something to drink?”
“Do you have cream soda?”
“I do,” she said, and she headed for the kitchen. While she was gone, I went to the piano bench and sat. The piano was huge—twice as big as the console upon which I had written her song. I played a few simple chords and played parts of a couple of scales with my right hand. My left hand was dead to scales, just there to provide simple chording. The keys were firm and springy, nothing like the old slow keys of my dark room piano.
Jane returned with my cream soda and a coaster. I took a much needed sip then placed the coaster and the drink on the piano.
As she moved to sit on the couch she asked me, “Are you ready?” The house was quiet. The living room was almost like a sanctuary with the piano being the altar. I said, “Yes I am,” and then I said, “Here I am, Lord,” and immediately offered a quick prayer to God to help me make it through this.
I began … the first notes. No mistakes. The passion was immediately there as was the beauty and the depth of boyhood love that I had for this young girl.
From the corner of my sight line I saw her lean forward and rest her head in her hands that were supported by her elbows on her knees. A smile came to her face as the notes became playful and suddenly it almost seemed as though she might cry when the notes became pensive and evocative. She was with me and the song, every inch of the way, feeling what it was saying to her with each of its phrases. I had purposely put a multitude of segments into it to illustrate all the elements of love that I felt for her as well as characteristics that she had.
The song began to end, phrases of powerful notes that could be likened to the end of a love story film of great magnitude in which the lovers had conquered a multitude of challenges. It was a progression of dynamic musical elements. I’ll never know how I wrote it except that wild wonderful things were flowing inside me for this girl and somehow they made their way through my system out the tips of my fingers then almost magically into the logic of the song. And then, it was over.
I looked at Jane. She was stunned. And I was 100 percent certain in that moment, no matter what else was going on in the rest of her life, she loved me. And it felt good for both of us.
“Again please, Turf” was all she said. I happily obliged. This time playing the frisky notes a little friskier, the sad parts with more pathos, and the powerful parts with greater emphasis. This time, when I was finished, she rose from her seated position, walked to where I was seated on the piano bench, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me hard … on the cheek. I took it, gladly, but all fantasies of true love ever existing between us dissipated in that instant. I knew what I was to her. I was someone very special, but I was not Dick the Skateboard Champion.
She returned to her seat on the couch and said, “Could you play it for me one more time, Turf; this time with a little feeling?” I laughed. I thought I had put about everything I had into my first two renditions. In fact, I felt like Van Clybourn playing a concert for his special lady. Somehow, there was more translated from my being through my fingertips to those keys the third time I played that song. When I was finished, I was exhausted. I think Jane was, too. She had been completely imbued not merely with the story the notes of the song conveyed to her, but the depth of feelings I had for her.
In a moment, her mother was home.
“You’ve got to hear this, Mom. Turf wrote it for me.” Jane’s mother sat her purse down on a chair and sat on the couch next to Jane. Together they looked like older and younger sisters, two gorgeous women, the same size, the same hauntingly blue eyes. I played the song one final time that day. When it was finished, Jane’s mother sat there shaking her head with her mouth open slightly. She appeared to be stunned that a boy of seventeen had such deep feelings for her daughter that he could write into a song like that for her.
Over the past two years I had written about ten songs. None of them as complicated or multimooded as for Jane, but each of them depicting some feeling I’d had about a thing, person, or event.
Now I was playing through the songs one by one, pouring out my feelings over having hurt Kathy. I was hoping that by playing, my own sorrows would leave my body through my fingertips.
When I finished the ten songs, I was nearly exhausted. I had played them with all the passion I could muster. I finally paused for more than merely a moment as I had when I was between playing the songs. I stretched my arms over my head, twisted my back to the left and the right to relieve the tension that had built up there since Kathy’s announcements. When I stretched to the right, I realized that there were seven people in the piano room—five women and two men, all college students. There were two couples and three girls sitting in three separate flowery print chairs. Christine, the girl who had driven me back to the dorm the night before, was in their midst.
When I finished with stretching and as it looked as if I might have completed my playing, the seven listeners clapped for me. It was the largest group I had ever played for. For a moment I lost my breath. I had never been applauded by that many people and I was a little embarrassed, but I caught my breath almost immediately and was filled with a very different kind of pride, knowing that my music had positively impacted seven total strangers.
Slowly, the group began to break up, all the individuals heading to wherever they had been going before the music had distracted them. Christine stayed, waiting for everyone else to leave before she spoke to me.
“How are you feeling today, Turf?”
“Believe it or not, I had an odd hangover for about an hour when I first got up, but it’s gone now.”
“Do you do that kind of thing often?” she asked (with extreme curiosity).
“Christine, last night was the first time in my life that I had ever drank. I stopped at a lonely friend of mine’s room and had a few drinks of rum and Coke, but I must have overdone it because I really did myself in.”
“When I saw you in the snow I was really worried about you, Turf.”
I could see genuine concern in her eyes.
“I’m okay today, thanks to you, Christine. God knows what might have happened to me had I slept the night out there. I could have had frost bite.”
“You could have died, just another drunk Evanston student dying in the snow.”
“Thank you, again.”
“I think you sort of repaid me with that beautiful music. I could never have imagined when I helped you to my car that you could create something that lovely.”
“How did you know that those songs were mine?”
“They were like nothing I have ever heard before. In fact, they were like tone poems, little stories, each one.”
I was stunned and flattered. She had nailed it. Each time I sat down to write a song, that was exactly my goal … to be able to tell a musical tale. I wanted to create the imagery of whatever I was thinking and feeling at the time. I simply wanted to create a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. There needn’t be any words. I never knew how a song would start or where it would go. I would begin searching. When I found something that sounded like what I was feeling, I put it into the song. Each song took weeks to create. There were thousands of wrong notes, renegade notes that had no business trying to force their way into my very specific story. And yet, after many weeks of struggle and alien notes and many spiteful moments between me and the piano, each song would come to an end. And when that happened, it seemed as if every solitary note in its final sequential position had been destined to be in exactly that place for all eternity. I told you that once before. But I’ve thought about that fact hundreds of times.
“You missed the first four or five songs, Christine. Would you like me to play them?”
“I would.”
I turned back around and started playing the songs, beginning with “For Jane” and in the sequence that I always played them. I never turned around the whole time I played. There was no clapping, no commenting at the complexities of any song. When I finished with the five songs I thought that she had missed, I turned around to see Christine crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, getting up from the piano bench and sitting in the flowery print chair next to hers.
“When I heard some of your music, it made me feel things from my past that I haven’t felt as deeply about in a long time … things that have happened to me when I was a little girl, a childhood friend of mine drowning when I was nine, my grandmother dying last year. Then one of your songs almost made me laugh. It wasn’t that it was funny, it was fun. And that song made me feel a whole lot of other different kinds of feelings. That song brought me back all over the place—to tea parties I had with my mom for years as a girl, summer vacations, riding on my first Ferris wheel when I was ten, sock hops, fun stuff. But it was that all the songs cumulatively were so evocative of my emotions. I never have been to a concert before today. But now I honestly feel that I have been to one.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Do you have to be somewhere?” I asked.
“I need to study in the library for about three or four hours.”
I wanted to be near her so badly. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Where’re your books?”
“Back at Kendal. I can go get them.”
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t I give you a ride to get your books and we can study in Kendal’s library?”
“One-half of that idea would be wonderful, telling me to get my books. But the library is locked up tight as a drum. There is only a skeleton staff of security guards working on the premises. I’d have to go to your library.”
“That’ll work.”
“I have one more idea and a couple of quick questions. Do you have Sunday night dinner on your meal plan?”
“No I don’t.”
“May I take you for pizza when you are finished studying?”
“That’ll work too, Turf,” she said with a girlish smile inhabiting her face.
So that’s what we did. We studied for four hours then drove through a dark frosty Evanston to the restaurant then shared a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. By the end of our first study date and meal together, we had developed a genuine fondness and respect for one another.