ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

When I was four or five, my mother decided for some reason that I was destined to become a musical prodigy. So, to this end, she enrolled me in piano lessons with the mother of one of my preschool classmates. The trouble with this was that going to their house was way too much fun for me to possibly concentrate on something as boring as playing the piano, which was basically something to get over with so that I could play with the other kids. They had this really wide set of stairs down to their finished basement, the underside of which their parents had fashioned into what amounted to a playhouse, complete with kid sized furniture. Like a real table and chairs our size, little shelves we could reach, and those plastic toy refrigerators and stoves that lucky kids had. And they had pretend kid-sized versions of things like cereal boxes and detergent bottles, with real brand names on them. At the time, this was a big deal. The best game we played was “store”. I always fought with my classmate and his little sister for the right to be the storekeeper, because that meant being able to organize the inventory (alphabetically) and work with the toy cash register. My mother had a hell of a time getting me to go home from this place, because we were kind of poor and only had smaller scale toys like Cabbage Patch Kids and The Happy Apple.

Anyway, to encourage me to take more of an interest in piano, my mother saved and bought me a small electronic Yamaha keyboard. The whole thing had probably 40 keys on it, which was what we could afford at the time, and had a few different “instrument” settings. The one I remember was the “violin”, which was my favorite, even though I later learned it sounded absolutely nothing like a string instrument of any kind. It sounded vaguely like that tone you get when you accidentally ding your Corelle with a fork. It also had a two minute memory for recording what you played, and a couple of “drum” settings that you could put on while you played, for tempo.

As a musical instrument, it left something to be desired. As a toy, it was great, although it did little to ignite my passion for the piano. Because I could not read music no matter how I was taught, I halfheartedly picked out some tunes by ear when my mother demanded that I “practice” from my songbooks. I generally preferred to play with two fingers, finding it far too complex to coordinate 10 at once. And it didn’t take long for me to figure out that there were way funner things I could be doing than practicing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” over and over.

The keyboard had an “oboe” setting, which, particularly when the octave slider was taken down to allow for very low notes, sounded approximately like you might imagine it would if an elephant seal broke wind. It did not really sound like an oboe. But I did not know this, nor did I care.

My mom was a little nonplussed when I told her I didn’t need to practice anymore, because I had composed my own song, which I titled “Cow Funeral”. Yeah. “Cow Funeral” consisted of a dit-dit-dit DAH drum machine backbeat sound, over which I had keyed long, irregular, dissonant tones using the oboe setting on the lowest octave, using the full two minutes of recording time the keyboard would hold. In my mind, these notes simulated the somberness of a funeral, punctuated by occasional raw sounds of uncontrollable grief. I’m not sure how I formed this mental image of a funeral, although it was probably from something I saw on TV. There is no way for me to adequately describe my opus, but it was a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.

“Well, honey,” my dad said brightly to my mom. “It does sound kind of like a cow funeral.”

Not long after that, I stopped having to take piano lessons.