Another Spin
Our first apartment was in a post-war six-plex near the Kansas City Plaza. It was full of hand-me-down furniture: an ugly love seat, 1970s-style burnt-orange lamps, a futon left over from Matt’s college apartment, a dresser made out of pressed wood, my old grade school desk. The pièce de resistance was our huge coffee table with ornately carved wooden legs and a heavy slate top, which weighed more than I did and took up the entire living room. Underneath, Matt stored a collection of New Yorker magazines going back ten years that he had kept “for the covers.” “For the covers?” I said. “If it is only the covers you want, I can work with that.” And thus, the New Yorker cover collection—the “marriage compromise collection” one friend calls it—was born.
Nearly thirty years later, the “marriage compromise collection” fills every inch of the walls of our sunroom. There are covers going back as far as the week Matt was born (December 1968), and one can watch the economic progression of time march across the prices of the single issues. We have covers marking significant events like Princess Diana’s death, 9/11 and Obama’s historic election, and many magical covers by a favorite French artist, Sempé. Students sit in the sunroom waiting for piano lessons and study the walls. They comment on dates and prices and artwork. They play games to find the newest cover or the oldest. I sometimes joke that their two takeaways from piano lessons are the New Yorker covers and the cats.
Or so it might seem, given the watercolor image on the photo above. This depiction of our sunroom was created by a former student, Rachael, who was in the studio for twelve years. She is now a fully grown adult with a job, a boyfriend and a dog. When I asked her if she’d be interested in designing our fall studio recital program cover, this was her brilliant response to a dozen years of piano study.
I’ll take it, and happily. If students can walk away from piano lessons with not only strong musical skills, but also a glimpse of how to live a life and build a sweet home for oneself, then I’ve done my job. If that life includes an interest in the world and a couple of cats, all the better.
Meanwhile, three decades later, Matt and I are still compromising. We compromise with each other, with the demands of our work and passions, with the hurdles and challenges life throws at us every day. We have been in this house now for almost twenty years, a reality that makes our heads spin. It’s not just the walls that are covered with the evidence of our time here; the bookcases are stuffed, the closets and cabinets overflowing. We live with our second generation of cats. Outside, there are fewer tulips and more grasses, fewer blooms and more cacti, as the garden settles into a gracefulness—or at least an acceptance—of the difficulties of thriving in a harsh high-desert climate.
We all have, perhaps. “Try to praise the mutilated world,” says the poet. We try. Most days, though there is much work to be done, the good still outweighs the bad. And so as the days shorten, the darkness lengthens, and the madness of the holidays threaten to overwhelm, we stop and try to breathe deeply. Here’s to another spin around the sun on this beautiful, broken planet. We’ll take it, gratefully.