My 120-year-old Chickering baby grand

Leslie Dala plays the Goldberg Variations  for my Birthday

Ever since I can remember there has been a piano in my life. My mother was a concert pianist. In Buenos Aires in the 40s and 50s we were too poor to have a piano in our Coghlan home. We would visit my grandmother who had a piano in her downtown apartment home. Sometimes my mother’s brother Tony and his sister Dolly would be there. My mother would accompany my grandmother and my Uncle Tony who sang and Aunt Dolly played a violin. It was then that I first heard my mother play Beethoven’s Monlight Sonata.

When we moved to Mexico by 1969 we had an upright Böesendorfer piano in our Arboledas home that my mother played. One day Rosemary told us that we could not pay the rent. My mother said we should sell the piano. She and I cried when the mover’s took the piano away.

By then my mother had advanced Menniere’s Disease. She had a constant ringing in her ears and suffered terrible vertigo. She would still play her piano in frustration telling me she had to imagine what the sound was.

In Vancouver we did not have a piano until 1991 when our neighbour from across the street who was an elderly woman told us that she and her husband were moving and would we want her piano, a 120 year-old Chickering baby grand her grandmother had given to her. The piano crossed the street for $500. It is now in my Kitsilano home.

No, I cannot play the piano but I often use it for photographs.