Playing Songs and Carols

Playing an amped portable electric piano with 56 notes, seated on an ottoman, the piano on the radiator, requires a sure-fingered fluency and a noisy room overstuffed with warm partygoers who are interested mainly in hot hors d’oeuvres and cool chit-chat. If your middle right finger, for instance, is weak or tired or sore and sits heavily on an A with your left hand playing a G chord, it ruins an otherwise evocative rendition of  I’ll be Home for Christmas, when other Christmases with another piano more forgiving would have brought the living room a kind of soft silence and pure tone to soften the hungriest of visitors, and carry them to the best of remembrances, their hunger instead for sweet childhood, late friends, grandparents’ frosted windows, a young beautiful mother and father, the miracle of Christmas lights and twinkle in the living placement of notes from a singular old rich piano and a clear voice of a man aching to be young.