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For a couple of years now, I’ve had this dream of putting a real, upright piano in my college bedroom. It’s an image beautiful for its eccentricity more so than its practicality; real pianos are not typically associated with bedrooms, let alone ones with chipping lead paint and chipmunks in the walls. Even so, I hold this daydream close to me like a necklace, twirling it in my fingers once in a while, letting myself relish in the ever-sweet sensations of “what if.”
I played piano for more than a decade as a child, but fell out of it toward the end of high school, to my great regret, as the reality of busy schedules and finite time set in. I loved playing and the idea of becoming better, but I just couldn’t seem to make these values click when it came to prioritizing my practice schedule. Ever since then, I’ve been itching to begin playing again. When I go home for the holidays, I’ll sometimes pick it back up for a bit, always trying (and never succeeding) to work my way through the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” sheet music. During my freshman year, I spent some time playing in the practice room of my dorm, but after suffering a humiliating loss in an after-hours piano duel (which I did not initiate), I lost gusto for a while. Other than these few, interstitial moments, a consistent relationship between the piano and me continues to feel ever so slightly out of reach.
Growing up, my family had an old upright gifted to us from a friend of a friend. It lives by the stairs to the second floor of our house and whenever I’d be passing by on my way up to my bedroom, I would often stop to play for a moment or two. Sometimes, my parents would come and sit on the chair next to the piano to watch me play, which made me oddly nervous and embarrassed of my mistakes; but, looking back on those years, I’ve realized that those occasions filled me with a deep sense of love and happiness. It was the best possible environment a young pianist could have asked for. I had the freedom to play whenever I wanted to, and my parents were clear that they loved to hear my well-rehearsed pieces and discordant practice sessions alike. I miss the habit of playing all the time, born of muscle memory and the sheer magnetism that existed between me and the piano in those days. I miss just being in such close proximity to a piano.
Out of these memories and all of the things that I miss about piano with such tenderness, I began to envision recreating this environment in the home where I live now. This is what my dream looks like when I play it out in my mind: I move my dresser somewhere else, anywhere else — and, against that wall, a beautiful upright piano, walnut or oak, would sit. It juts out awkwardly, but I don’t mind at all. The lid of the bench lifts up, and inside I keep the sheet music I’m not using. The crinkled and overly annotated pages I am using stay resting precariously on the ledge above the keys, a perpetual reminder of all the things I have to learn and all the music I want to play. When I come home after class, I throw my backpack to the side, run to the piano gleefully like a kid to a playground and start playing to my heart’s content. Nobody gets tired of hearing me practice, too. All of my choppy arpeggios, missed notes and repeated measures are felt only as a gentle ripple through the air of the house my roommates and I share. In my dream, not only is the piano in my bedroom and not only do I practice as often as I should, but I can also take comfort in knowing that the noise I create can be messy; the pressure for perfection, a feeling that playing in a public space can often create, is alleviated.
To the great surprise of any 18th-century pianist, it is not difficult to find a free piano these days. I see them all the time at garage sales and on Facebook Marketplace, but the catch (because there is always a catch) is that you’d have to transport it yourself. Pianos, even free ones, are heavy and can be expensive to move if you’re using a professional service. So, even in the face of great opportunity (free pianos around every corner), my dream stops here. I could opt for a keyboard instead, but there’s just something so romantic about a real wooden piano — eternally dingy, always a little bit out of tune. With the help of several strong and patient friends, I know I could find a way to move a piano into my bedroom, but the rosy-lensed perspective is shattered when I start to imagine myself dragging a wooden piano on skateboards down the uneven sidewalks of Ann Arbor. And I’m busier now than I was in high school; realistically, I don’t know where I’d find the time in my schedule to practice piano consistently like I want to.
So why do I indulge in this dream at all when, in my head, I know how it’s going to end? Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, as the idiom proclaims, there are no truly free pianos either, and their hidden cost is just high enough to keep me from trying to obtain one. But the idea that something as decadent as a real, wooden piano is relatively accessible continues to enthrall me. More than I really truly care about having a piano in my bedroom, I am in love with this idea that there legitimately are (semi)free pianos all around us. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the dreamscapes that exist in everyday life, if nothing else.
I’ve always had a tendency to romanticize first and consider reality after. I’m a gullible person, a sucker for wild dreams and grand promises who would rather choose to believe in something than to default toward distrust. It can be a frustrating way to live because when you’re constantly aspiring to the best case scenario or to the idea that literally anything is possible, you are inevitably setting yourself up for frequent failure. Even so, I continue to feel that it would be a rejection of myself to not opt towards optimistic first impressions. People who are inherently skeptical of grandiose dreams are probably saved a lot of heartache, but I’ve never felt myself to be one of them.
After nearly two decades of living this way, I’ve felt reality come crashing down enough times to know it’s there, but still I insist on these idealistic dreams of mine: the “live in a cabin on the side of a mountain and write for a living” dream, the “thru hike the Appalachian Trail by myself” dream, the “live in a commune with all of my closest friends and family” dream and, of course, the “find a free upright piano and give it a home in my college bedroom” dream. Sometimes these feel like unrealistic and starry-eyed aspirations to hold, but that’s only when I consider them in the context of my life as it is now. How could I, or anyone else, be one to say with definitive clarity that these grand, storybook ideas might not fit into the life I end up living 15 years from now?
I don’t believe thinking and dreaming should be limited within the scope of practicality, and I don’t think I’m naive for having this perspective either. Practicality should be reserved for questions like “how much money can I afford to spend at the grocery store today?” and not “what are some fulfilling ways that I could spend part of my life?”
My unrealistic dreams sustain me in ways that my normal, smaller, responsible goals aren’t always able to. There is so much power in having something abstract to yearn for. It keeps you grounded in what you love, reminds you of where your values are and holds the essence of the things you most deeply desire. It’s not a deterrent from reality, but rather a form of harnessing into this deeper understanding of what it means to be human — to contain multitudes, to want to experience multitudes. Practical thinking insists that you can only have one life, but letting yourself dream freely gives space to believe that you can live as many as you want.
The mirage of an upright piano in my college bedroom is more about the potential of what can be imagined beyond the constraints of space, time and prudence than it is about the piano itself.
I continue to feel excited when I think about possibility unfulfilled, about this dream I once had that connected me anew to an instrument I always cared about deeply. Dreams are kept alive by thinking about them, even if they will probably never come true. The free pianos that are never picked up are memorialized by staying the object of someone’s fantasy even as they are consigned to living in a dusty garage forever. This slight sliver of chance that action can be attached to a daydream is just something I let myself dwell on from time to time to keep my imagination lit.
Statement Columnist Katie Lynch can be reached at katiely@umich.edu.
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