My Mother’s Piano

“Where are you from?” One of many questions I find unanswerable, along with “What do you do?” and “Who’s your favorite?” I have some stock replies, foils to fend off the thrust of the inquiry, but the truth is I came from underneath a piano. We moved so many times growing up, many neighborhoods, schools, new circles to try to enter, if only for a year. You might as well ask the birds where they are from. But through all the many houses, one corner reliably said “home.” Like a massive black ark, housing the sacred relics of a nomadic clan, my mother’s Steinway somehow sanctified each new encampment, making it home. And when our serial sense of alienation threatened, home was ever at hand. All we had to do was crawl under the ebony canopy and let my mother’s resonant blanket of Brahms enfold us.