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11/16/97
COMMENTARY: How my friend Gene provided piano therapy for both of us
By BRIAN DICKINSON
PIANO THERAPY? I thought I had heard of every therapy under the sun, but piano therapy? How recklessly radical, I thought. In point of fact, I had never so much as imagined piano therapy until one recent afternoon, when a friend dropped by. . . . But that's getting ahead of our story.
Not far from our suburban place lives a man whom we shall call Gene, for that is his name. (Actually, for dress-up occasions and business letters he is "Eugene," but otherwise folks just leave off the first syllable.)
Gene is a retired trial lawyer in his early 60s, a tall, robust man with a resonant, theatrical voice. He is a serious student of legal argument, and would have made a commanding presence in any courtroom. His seven children are grown; he is long since divorced from their mother.
About two years ago, Gene developed persistent discomfort in his chest and sought medical help. He underwent heart surgery, then developed a lung abcess that gave rise to suspicions of a malignant tumor. That fear proved groundless, but all the procedures gave rise to a nasty staph infection that is still with him two years later. Once each day, a nurse from the Visiting Nurses Association arrives to irrigate the infected area, as a sort of preventive maintenance. Various irrigation formulas have been tried, but the infection persists.
This chronic medical disability had a depressing effect on Gene, normally an exuberant, outgoing man. He grew gloomy and withdrew from the world. Depression aggravated other symptoms, and his children began to fear for his life.
For months, Gene had followed the course of my own illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, through my columns in the Journal-Bulletin. We heard that he had taken heart from my narrative, and when he dropped in a few weeks back to help me observe a birthday, he said as much in quite generous terms.
Toward the end of that occasion, I could hear someone playing pop tunes on our piano in another room, and doing a masterful job of it, too, from what I could hear. It turned out that the pianist was none other than my friend and neighbor, Gene.
What I had not known was that, long before he entered upon the practice of law, Gene had played the piano professionally. As he explained later, he had played with various orchestras for club dates, weddings and other celebratory occasions up and down the East Coast.
That experience had furnished Gene with invaluable training, as I recently discovered when he paid me a return visit. At his request, I had jotted down a dozen or so of my favorite song titles, and he propped the list up on the piano's music rack, seated himself on the bench and began to warm up.
From the start, I knew that we were in for a treat. Since my illness had driven me into a wheelchair, I had not heard much live music. I certainly had not heard solo piano, close up, performed by someone who knew his way around a piano. My nurse Jane King wheeled me to a kitchen spot that gave me a fine view of Gene at the keyboard.
My list of songs was unremarkable, consisting as it did of show tunes and familiar standards from the '30s and '40s. Yet I liked my list well enough, if for no other reason than that it represented my mini-protest against the dominant trend in pop music of our time, much of which seems built around colored smoke, dazzling strobe lights and performers who mostly scream nonsense sounds into immense amplifiers. Let us just say that melody does not stand high on their list of musical virtues.
Gene worked his way down my list: "Love for Sale," "Night and Day," "Love Me or Leave Me" - tunes of that ilk. He played without visible effort, recalling the melodies flawlessly, adding rich harmonies with a nimble left hand. He conjured up some musical jokes, as when he smoothly interspersed strains of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata into "Night and Day."
As this impromptu recital blossomed, it became clear that Gene was enjoying himself hugely. He was getting more rich tone (and more volume) from our little spinet than I had heard in quite some while. Fearlessly, he laced into "Sweet Georgia Brown" with the energy of a linebacker, piling chord upon chord into a dizzying heap that threatened to come crashing down, until Gene, with some pianistic pyrotechnics of his own design, brought the tune to a rousing end.
Gene played with a verve and panache that would have held my attention at any time, but for me this concert conveyed additional power. For one thing, Gene's talented playing also recalled for me my refusal, at age seven, to give piano lessons a try. That bit of small-fry recalcitrance has been a source of regret since. (Moral to all parents: See that your children get music lessons of some sort.)
Our recital wound down with Gene doing improvisations on other pop classics new and old. It had been some show, and for me, as principal listener, it most assuredly had been good therapy. The music had evoked memories beyond number, had lifted me from the confines of my usual daily routine, had gladdened my heart.
I suspect that the 90 minutes of keyboard therapy had lifted the spirits of another patient. As Gene stood up from the piano, he beamed the sort of broad smile that he had not shown for a while. It was, I thought, a smile of satisfaction and contentment. He felt good about the session, with good reason.
Gene tells me that he'll be back soon to give another concert. Therapy, it appears, can work both ways.
Brian Dickinson is the Journal-Bulletin's editorial columnist.
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