When the Sentimental Clutter in Your Life is a Whole Piano

A few years ago, I overheard a woman telling her friend that she’d finally found a meaningful way to get rid of the piano her father had given her when she was a child. Because he’d died so soon afterward, she held onto it for decades, even though she didn’t play it, out of a combination of guilt and sentimentality. The gift had become an albatross. The tone of her voice—especially the way it leaned on the word meaningful—seemed to carry so much emotion and history that I knew instantly that I would spend the next few years unpacking and recreating it in the form of a novel.

I’ve long struggled with my relationship to objects with provenance, mostly because by nature I appreciate minimalism and order. But I was born into a family of artists and archivists, and we have a lot of stuff: my grandfather’s countless woodworking treasures; handmade quilts and blankets from the women on my mother’s side; my father’s photographs, souvenirs, and mementos that have been passed down from one generation to another. Part of me wants to preserve everything with the care and love it deserves, and part of me wants to set it all on fire. So the idea of this woman dragging an enormous, burdensome, unwanted object into adulthood fascinated me. Equally fascinating was imagining what it might’ve meant to all the people who’d encountered or possessed it before she had.

The novel that came out of my wondering is The Weight of a Piano. It follows the interweaving stories of two women—a Soviet concert pianist and a young mechanic in California—and their shared, devastating connection to the same Blüthner piano, its tragic history, and to each other. In post-WWII Russia, young pianist Katya Zeldin receives what will become her most prized possession: a Blüthner piano. The piano is the most constant presence of her short life, accompanying her as she marries, flees Russia with her husband and young son as Soviet Refusniks, and re-settles in Los Angeles. In modern day, Clara Lundy struggles to let go of the same Blüthner, which she’s been dragging around with her since her father gifted it to her for her 12th birthday, just before his sudden and unexplained death.

But it wasn’t until four years later, as I was writing the acknowledgements for the novel, that I decided to track the woman down and thank her before the book was released. It turned out that Meredith Canada only vaguely remembered me or my asking permission to borrow this fragment of her history, but she was delighted to know that it had taken on new life inside my imagination. Except for those few lines I overheard, I barely remembered Meredith, either. We didn’t know each other; she was a friend of a friend. Yet in that brief, serendipitous meeting, she’d given me the idea for what would become my favorite and most ambitious project to date. Suddenly a mention in the back of the book seemed inadequate. I asked her if we could meet, because although I’d written a novel that her relationship with her piano and her father had inspired, I wanted to know the real story behind the story.

In that brief, serendipitous meeting, she’d given me the idea for what would become my favorite and most ambitious project to date.

In the 1960s, John Kingston Canada was the principal of Woodville High School in a small, mostly-white town in east Texas. His wife, Mayme, taught home economics. As proponents of racial and cultural equality, they worked hard to expose the African American kids in a district still in the shadow of the Jim Crow Era to art and music—starting with their own two children.

Meredith showed an early interest in music. Her father, wanting to ignite that spark, did something that in retrospect seems impossible to Meredith: he bought a brand-new upright Kohler & Campbell piano for her seventh birthday. She remembers being awe-struck when the deliverymen carried that shiny, fancy treasure into the house. “That was something he did just for me. Even then I knew it was special, the way his face lit up. It couldn’t have been easy for them with two teachers’ salaries. I found the receipt many years later—he spent $3,000 on that piano.”

A petite woman now, she was so small then her legs barely dangled off the bench when she sat down for her weekly lessons and nightly practice. While playing, she often glanced over her shoulder at her father, who’d be sitting on the couch behind her, reading the paper or relaxing—and always paying attention to what she was learning. He wasn’t a musician, but he was thrilled that she was becoming one.

One day, John Canada came home from work, and Meredith ran and leapt into his arms like she usually did. But this time, he couldn’t pick her up. “Daddy’s not feeling so good,” he told her. The next morning, one of the teachers collected her from her elementary school classroom and took her to the hospital. All the adults she knew were there, she remembers. After a while, someone came out of her dad’s room and said to her brother, “You’re the man of the family now.” John had had a stroke. Meredith was eight years old.

Afterward, she tried to keep up her music practice, but now that her mother was on her own, she couldn’t afford the lessons anymore. Everything was different: her family, their daily routine, life. Even the piano seemed different. It stopped being a source of music and joy, and became instead a bittersweet fixture in the house, silent and still while the reduced family tried to move on. As much as it reminded her of her father’s love, it was also a reminder that he was gone.

Meredith grew up and went to college, and Mayme remarried. There wasn’t a place for the piano in this new phase of their lives, but they couldn’t simply abandon it. Instead, they asked a close relative to take it, and for years, it lived—cared for but unplayed—in his home. For a short time when she was in her mid-thirties, Meredith brought the piano, finally, home. A few years later, she moved into a multi-story condominium. Here she faced a conundrum: the only available spot for the piano was on the third floor. It would require a special team of movers and a small fortune to get it up there. And why should she? At this point in her life, she had time and money enough for law school, not to renew her long-ago interest in music. Nevertheless, she wanted to keep it. Maybe she even needed to.

Time passed. She and her partner, Michelle, decided to buy a house together. Blending their physical lives proved more challenging than uniting their emotional ones—they had so much excess stuff they had to rent offsite storage to hold it all. When they decided which of their belongings would best reflect their new beginning, the old piano didn’t make the cut. It lived for years in a 10’x10′ unit, buried under boxes and surrounded by other items that no longer fit into their owners’ lives.

New neighbors with a young son moved in next door. The boy got older and started piano lessons, practicing at home on an unremarkable portable keyboard. His mother started looking for a real piano—-nothing too expensive, but a step up. Meredith told her she had one the boy could borrow. The neighbor demurred, thinking she’d put Meredith in an awkward position. “Really,” Meredith insisted. “You’d be doing me a favor.”

After all this time, after trying unsuccessfully to find another home for it, she wondered if perhaps she was meant to keep it after all.

The boy was devoted to his practice and each time Meredith heard the music filing their air between their houses, she was happy. The nagging guilt she’d felt whenever she thought of her father’s gift sitting in that un-air-conditioned storage unit abated. The piano was finally fulfilling its purpose, and that it was so close by seemed like a double blessing.  Strangely, it was like some part of her father had been returned to her. Eventually, the boy got so good that he needed something more sophisticated, and Meredith again had to decide what to do.

Meredith didn’t want to take it back only to let it languish in a corner, or against a wall like mere furniture. Its potential had been discovered and it needed someone to continue making the music it was built for. But no other friends or neighbors wanted it. No piano schools or teachers. She offered it to several local churches and community centers, to no avail. A local estate liquidator said it was easier to give away a cat than a piano. Apparently Meredith wasn’t the only one who wished to donate an unused instrument.

She’d almost given up when she received a message from a woman who’d heard about her situation. “My little girl is taking lessons, and I’d like to give her a piano,” she said. Suddenly, Meredith was unsure. After all this time, after trying unsuccessfully to find another home for it, she wondered if perhaps she was meant to keep it after all. 

On the arranged date, still weighed down by uncertainty, Meredith met the woman and her daughter at the neighbor’s house. The little girl, Chloe, who was seven years old, arrived with her music notebook tucked under one arm. Meredith watched her climb purposefully onto the bench, her little legs barely dangling off the edge. She propped open her notebook and paused to caress the keys before playing a short piece. Afterward, she looked at her mother with pleading eyes.

Watching Chloe, Meredith knew it was time. The piano had been a gift to her at the same age, and it felt right—perfect, even—to share that gift now with the little girl. Seeing the little girl’s face light up was like glimpsing her father again, and Meredith recognized that his gift would still be with her, even if she gave the piano away.

I sat for a long, moving time at the coffee shop with Meredith, listening to her remember. The story she told me and the one I wrote had very little in common, but some of the themes were the same: a child’s love for her parents, the unifying power of music, the complications of loss and grief, the liberation of letting go. As I’d suspected it would, learning those details from her life gave me a new appreciation for how stories—even just brief, overheard snippets of them—can affect and connect us. Just like in The Weight of a Piano, Meredith’s gift was significant to many people along the way, including me. In passing her piano along to someone else, she also gifted me with something magnificent: the idea for a novel. Now I’m standing in a long line of receivers of that shiny instrument, ready to give it away all over again.