I had the opportunity to visit Beth's In-Laws yesterday, Baby Martyn's other grandparents. They are Walter and Mary Jane Loehrke; they live in a wonderful place in Washington State just north of the Oregon border, more than an hour's drive from Portland.
We enjoyed a delicious lunch, and the Loehrke's enjoyed some fun time with Baby Martyn, who is at the perfect age to delight grandparents' hearts. We walked up through their evergreen-forested mountain to see the spring that provides water to their house, which was originally a tiny log cabin built around the turn of the century. It has been expanded to a spacious two-story log home, surrounded by lovely flowers and meadows, and in the shadow of the forest.
Before we returned to Beth's home in Portland, we opened their piano, which they have offered for Martyn's use as soon as Beth and Eli are willing to move it. Eli and his brothers had lessons in years past, but none of them ever took a special interest in learning to play, so Walt and Mary Jane would love to have Martyn try.
I played it for a few minutes. I'm so glad Martyn will have the opportunity to learn if he wants to. As a child, I didn't have that opportunity. But when I was in the fourth grade, the Lord provided a fourth grade teacher to give me lessons during the last months I lived in Arkansas before our newly blended family moved to California. (See Adjusting To New Family Dynamics... published in May.) After that I put what I had learned about reading music (which wasn't much) together with some chords I "picked up" from music written for guitar accompaniment, and gradually over the years learned to play accompaniment for hymns sung at church.
We never had a piano in our home until I left home and married Dave Goins in 1964. Most of the time after that, I have had a piano in my home. And I have provided pianos, regular or electronic, to my children as they grew into adulthood, just in case they have a desire to play. Now the Lord is providing one for Beth and her children.
The real story, though, is about Mama's first piano, back when she was a teenager. She wanted so much to play the piano. The Coalter family were so poor they could barely keep the twelve children fed. At school Mama had a friend whose family was "well off" enough to buy lessons for their daughter. That girl brought her books to school, and she and Mama sneaked upstairs to the piano in the school auditorium where she "taught" Mama whatever she had learned that week from the piano teacher. Then Mama would "practice" on an old stump in the woods where she had drawn a keyboard with a pencil. But there was no piano at home. She didn't think there ever would be one.
One summer the wife of one of Mama's older brothers died, and Mama was sent to their home to help take care of the surviving children, two girls just younger than Mama. When they returned home, they walked ten miles across cotton fields, and entered Pap'aw's farm from the back corner. They could see the back of their house, and the dogs came out barking to greet them while they were still far away. But Pap'aw and Mam'aw came out right behind the dogs and ran across the field to hug them.
Pap'aw was excited, Mama could just tell. He put his arm around her shoulder, and said, "Etta, I got you a piano..."
She couldn't believe it. "How? Where?"
"Just come see it." They went in through the kitchen to the front room. There it was. Pap'aw had traded two heifers for it. It had been through the 1927 flood. The ivory was off a lot of the keys. Some of the keys didn't play at all. But it was a piano. You could mash the keys. She didn't have to play the keyboard she had drawn on the stump. She had her a piano.
She learned to play, too. Her story taught me that if you really want to do something, you do the best you can, and God will make a way for the rest.
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