Changing Vocations

Before performing, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein would wear a pair of his deceased mother's black gloves. It comforted him. I only know this because that's what he told my mother once, backstage, when she, too, was a concert pianist. It's one of the very few stories from her performing years that I ever heard. She had quit her profession--suddenly and dramatically--long before I'd been born. She never really gave me a full explanation for her decision. As an adult, I can surmise that it had been a combination of burnout along with a revolt against the career path she'd been set on with minimal choice.

She never really found her bearings in any other career. I can identify with that. I remember I was quite young when I was with my mother and someone asked me if I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. My mother smiled down at me, waiting to hear my reply.

"I'd like to be a go-go dancer with tall white boots."

Nervous laughter from my mother. "Oh, Karla, you don't mean that!"

"No, I do. The ones who dance in cages."

An image from a tv show must have made a big impression on me.

A couple years later, my grandfather gave me a book on home remedies by a Vermont country doctor. Always impatient and looking for the fastest way to my goals, I now had a new profession. In my room at night, I drew a dozen business cards with my phone number and name--in colored pencil--followed by "M.D.". I passed my cards out in my class to those I thought would be the least problematic patients. And, oddly, I started getting calls from some of my classmates. After overhearing the third conversation in which I advised, "Take a tablespoon of warm honey with a glass of warm milk...", my father asked what was going on. I proudly showed him the master copy of my business card and that ended my short-lived medical profession. I was very annoyed.

I think the only career choice I ever made that stayed with me through the years was to be a writer. It waivered between being a bohemian, attic-dwelling poet to being a solid journalist, with many variations in between, but the goal of being a writer became a constant.

There's one memory that will never leave me. As an adult, I lived on the east coast while my mother lived in the midwest. Always close, we'd talk a few times a week. One November evening, she suddenly told me she'd had the piano tuned that day. She wanted to start playing again.

I really didn't know what to say, aside from a mild, "Oh, that's great!"

My brain was trying to wrap around the news. Decades ago, she'd sat before a keyboard in front of a full audience and then, inexplicably, stood up and walked off the stage. She'd never looked back. She'd occasionally played the piano for her parents, who had recently died. Was she going to begin playing for her own pleasure? I wondered if she imagined ever playing in front of an audience again.

"Well, it's late, so I'm going to go for now. I love you."

"I love you, too, Mom." I'd ask her more about it later.

When I was at work the next day, I got a call that my mother had died in a car accident earlier that morning. In the hard, sharp pain of grief, one nagging detail was that she'd never had a chance to play the just-tuned piano. She'd never had the chance to act on the step forward she'd decided to take.

The next week, I received a box from UPS. My mother had mailed it an hour before the accident. Inside was an ivory muslin Christmas tree skirt she'd sewn. Attached was a hand-written note: "I hope you remember me every time you use this."

I do, Mom. I do. All the time. In more ways than you could know.