My mother's piano is worth about $100.
At least that's what it's worth now.
It's a Kohler & Campbell console, and it is still sitting in the same family home where it has been for most of my life.
Right now, we're emptying that house in Los Angeles.
My older brother, Gerry, has lived there for 50 years. He's moving to a retirement community, and after half a century, everything that has always been there is being sorted. Kept. Given away. Sold.
Soon there will be an estate sale.
And the piano will be part of it.
My mom died six years ago, at 94.
She specifically left that piano to me in her will.
I'm not taking it.
I have been surprised by how much that decision has affected me.
Because as I've been thinking about that piano, memories I haven't connected in decades have started connecting themselves.
And I'm realizing that piano may be one of the most valuable possessions my mom ever owned.
Just not in the way an estate-sale company measures value.
To understand the piano, you have to understand my mother, Mary Ellen.
Number three of a group of seven brothers and sisters, she grew up during the Depression with a strict mother and a gentle father who was a pacifist minister.
Scrimping and saving weren't quaint ideas to her. They were simply how you lived.
Nothing was wasted. Not string. Not socks. And not food.
She would buy a half gallon of milk, make another half gallon from powdered instant milk, mix them together, and now we had a gallon of terrible-tasting milk.
That's what you did with three growing boys in the '60s.
She made her own clothes.
I can still picture her sitting at the kitchen table, the Butterick pattern carefully pinned to colorful material, hunched over a cast-iron Singer sewing machine that felt like it weighed 800 pounds.
She was good at sewing. I remember one pink suit she knitted for herself that was stunning. Yes, knitted a skirt and matching jacket.
But half the time when she was sewing fabric I'd hear, "Shit," coming from the kitchen.
That usually meant she'd measured something wrong, cut the fabric, and discovered the dress she'd spent hours making - was ruined.
There was no return button. You measured. You cut. You sewed. You lived with the consequences.
And sometimes you got it wrong.
My mother was also a baker.
Not someone who occasionally made cookies. She baked bread. Cakes. Her dinner rolls are legendary to this day. The kind of baking that takes love ... and work.
And that brings me to S&H Green Stamps.
If you're of a certain age, you remember them.
Stores gave you Green Stamps when you made purchases, particularly grocery stores. You saved them, pasted them into books, and when you filled enough books, you could redeem them for merchandise.
Every Saturday night, my mother had a ritual.
Before we all settled in to watch TV, out came all the Green Stamps she had accumulated that week.
Then came her little sponge.
That sponge was almost sacred. It had its own red pad it sat on.
She didn't lick the stamps. She carefully wet each one with the sponge and placed it into its proper little square.
One after another.
Page after page.
Book after book.
As a child, I just saw Green Stamps.
At 68, I see something entirely different.
I was watching my mother turn patience into purchasing power.
There was real accomplishment in filling those books. Every completed page meant she was closer to something she wanted. We had a showroom where you took your books in to redeem them. It was like she had free money.
The first reward I remember was a new Sunbeam mixer.
The mixer she had wasn't up to the challenge of the heavy, sticky bread dough she made. So she saved enough Green Stamps to get a better one.
She used those stamps for practical tools. An electric skillet that let her control the heat better than cooking on the stovetop.
A good icing bowl.
A set of sharp knives.
Each one made her better at something she cared about.
She knew exactly what she wanted. She knew why she wanted it. And she knew what it had taken to get it.
But the piano was different.
To understand why, you have to know what she gave up.
At Bridgewater College, my mother took piano.
She wanted to be a singer.
She was also head of the school paper - until she wrote an opinion piece pointing out that professors could take the day before Thanksgiving off while students got dinged for missing class.
She had a point.
She was forced to resign. Her dad, also a professor there, said how disappointed he was in her. Devastated.
Her voice, silenced.
She became a schoolteacher. She taught Earth Science to seventh graders and spent 50 years in classrooms.
At some point in the '60s, she figured out that if she earned her master's degree, she could get a pay raise.
That was the reason.
More education meant more money.
More money meant she could give us a better life.
So she enrolled at the University of Toledo.
I don't think I understood until recently what that actually required of her.
She drove 20 minutes to school to teach from 7:30 in the morning until 3:30.
Then Monday through Thursday, she drove back home and went to night school.
Four nights a week.
For two years.
I was very young.
We had a babysitter who came after school, and one of the memories that returned to me while thinking about all this was sitting with Mrs. Lehaney in her white Dodge Valiant, waiting for my mother to finish class, fall through spring, so she could deliver me to my mom and go home.
Toledo winters are cold.
I remember sitting in that car waiting.
I knew Mom was at school.
I knew we couldn't go home yet.
I knew I was cold.
What I couldn't understand was that Mom had already spent the entire day teaching other people's kids, and now she was spending her evening sitting in a classroom herself.
Monday.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
Then she'd get up and do it again.
For two years.
For a pay raise.
For us.
There is something about getting older that changes the mathematics of childhood.
As children, we remember waiting in the car.
As adults, we finally calculate what our parents were doing while we waited.
She finished her master's degree.
And sometime after that, she bought herself a brand-new piano.
Not with Green Stamps.
This wasn't the Sunbeam mixer.
This wasn't an electric skillet.
This wasn't stretching half a gallon of milk into a gallon.
This was something beautiful.
Something she wanted.
She had done it.
All those days teaching.
All those nights at the University of Toledo.
All those winter evenings.
All those hours away from home.
She had earned the degree.
She had earned the raise.
And with that first paycheck, she could buy the piano.
And she played it.
There is one piece I can still hear. Waves of the Ocean, by Charles D. Blake.
It's a galop - a fast, lively dance piece that lived in the piano books of American parlors for generations.
It rolls up and down the keyboard for five minutes and finishes with big dramatic chords.
Not an easy piece.
She could play it. My hands couldn't.
But I could hear her make music after school, when my dad and brothers weren't home yet. Just us in the house. Her playing for herself.
There was something else in our house in those years, something I was too young to understand.
It was 1965.
My dad was head of the Council of Churches, and he had thrown himself into the civil rights work of that era.
Important work.
It was also pulling their marriage apart.
My mom kept the brave face at work. Everything was fine except Saturday mornings when my brothers were gone.
My bedroom was directly over the kitchen. Pillows over my ears couldn't cover the shouting.
At Christmas, I was given a bow and arrow. It was just a piece of cheap wood with a red band in the middle for where to hold it.
I was seven. Young enough to do something stupid and then go outside to play without giving it another thought.
I knew this little musical flourish you could do on a piano, where you run your forearm across the keyboard from the low notes up to the higher ones and then tap two notes, dit-dit. Endlessly entertaining for a seven-year-old.
It was my shortcut to the ending of Waves of the Ocean.
I loved doing it.
One day I invited a few friends over and played it for them.
Then, I looked at the bow from my new bow-and-arrow and thought: I bet I can do that with this - even better.
I rocked the bow from all the low notes across the keys and hit the two high notes: dit-dit.
That got boring so we went outside to play.
When I came home a few hours later, my mother was hunched over the keyboard.
I could smell the Pine-Sol before I saw the beige wash bucket.
She was slowly, carefully rubbing the white keys with an old rag.
She thought the marks on the ivory were just the red paint from the bow and that she could clean them off.
But soon she felt it wasn't just paint.
That cheap bow had deeply scratched the ivory keys. They would never be the same.
No words were spoken. She looked as if every care in the world was sitting on her back.
I knew I had done something terrible. But I didn't understand what I had actually damaged.
I thought I had scratched some piano keys.
I understand now that I had scratched her proof.
And I wonder now what else she saw in those keys.
Her marriage was coming apart by then. She kept the brave face. Everything was fine.
The piano was the one achievement no one could take from her.
And her son had taken a bow to it.
There was another chapter with that piano.
I took piano lessons on Friday afternoons.
I didn't like them because I wasn't getting much better.
Of course, I wasn't practicing either.
About the best I could manage was picking out the theme from the film Born Free.
One Friday, my mom was going to be late, so I called my piano teacher Mrs. Kennedy and told her I couldn't make the lesson.
"No problem," she said. "You can call anytime."
Well, that was useful information.
So I did it again.
And then again.
Until my mother found out.
It was summer, and I was wearing shorts.
She called me downstairs, took a yardstick, and hit the bare backs of my legs just above my knees.
It was the only time she ever did anything like that.
I ran upstairs to my room and blocked the door. "You get back down here," she yelled. I didn't. And I never really went back to the piano.
For years, I remembered that as the time my mother raised welts because I skipped piano lessons.
At 68, I understand something about that anger I couldn't understand then.
My mother hadn't had a piano growing up.
She had grown up in the Depression. She had stretched milk, made clothes, saved Green Stamps and worked for what she had.
Then she had taught all day and gone to school four nights a week for two years.
And bought herself a piano.
And then she gave me lessons.
She was giving her son something she never had growing up.
First I scarred the piano.
Then I treated the opportunity to learn it as if it didn't matter.
I was treating casually something that had cost her dearly.
A few years later, we moved to California for a new start.
The piano came with us.
A couple of years after that, my father divorced her.
And at some point, she sat down at the piano and tried to play Waves of the Ocean again.
It wouldn't come.
Years of not practicing had taken it from her.
She still had the piano.
The music was gone.
My life has a strange sense of timing because years later, in high school, I decided I wanted to be a conductor.
Not just a conductor. I wanted to make music on Broadway.
That was the dream.
When I got to Chapman College, I discovered they wouldn't even let me take conducting lessons until my junior and senior years.
My first year, I nearly flunked out.
Ds and Cs in my music classes.
The other students had decided to be musicians at four or five. They'd had years of ear training, sight reading, theory.
I was years behind - the kid who had skipped his lessons.
But I didn't change majors. I didn't drop out.
I kept going.
Where do you think I learned that?
So in my senior year, I decided to find out how people actually became Broadway conductors.
I wrote letters to 18 Broadway conductors. Three wrote back.
And all three essentially told me the same thing. You need to be a great rehearsal pianist.
Well, I wasn't.
The best I had in my hands by then was one simple Chopin nocturne - the piece that got me through my piano proficiency exam at Chapman.
Enough to pass an exam. Nowhere near enough to sit in a Broadway rehearsal room.
I had spent years avoiding the very skill that I suddenly discovered I needed.
I don't tell that story because I think, "If only I had practiced, I would have conducted on Broadway."
Who knows? But today I think about the irony.
The lessons I had tried so hard to escape became the skill I wished I had.
My mother and I had learned the same lesson from the same piano. My mom couldn't have known that when she bought it.
I certainly couldn't have known it when I was skipping lessons.
Sometimes we don't understand the gift until long after we've stopped using it.
My brother is leaving the family home after 50 years. We're going through a lifetime of belongings.
And there's the piano. Still there.
The same piano.
The piano my mother bought after earning her master's degree.
The piano she played Waves of the Ocean on for herself.
The piano I scarred with a bow.
The piano I refused to practice.
The piano she reached for after the divorce and couldn't find again.
The piano connected to a Broadway dream that never happened.
The piano my mother specifically left to me.
And I'm not taking it.
For a while, that sentence bothered me.
It felt like there was something wrong with letting it go.
If it meant that much, Bob, shouldn't you keep it?
Shouldn't I find a place for it?
Shouldn't I preserve it because she wanted me to have it?
But I'm starting to think that isn't what the piano asks of me.
My mother didn't do all of that so I would spend the rest of my life guarding her possessions.
She did it so I could have a better life. And I did.
The piano did its job.
I conducted my own chorus for over a decade - three concerts a year at the 1,000-seat Carpenter Center in Long Beach.
My mom attended many of them.
The woman who wanted to be a singer, whose voice was silenced in college, sat in those seats and watched her son help other people find theirs.
And in a way, I've done the same thing ever since on sales floors.
Because nobody deserves to be told they don't belong.
I've talked about merchandise, selling, customer service, conversion and average ticket - all the numbers retailers measure.
We know what products cost.
We know their margins.
We know their SKUs.
We know how many are sitting in the stockroom.
But I've always believed there is something much bigger happening when a person buys something.
I think now I know where some of that belief came from.
Sometimes we buy proof.
Proof that we saved enough.
Proof that we made it.
Proof that we got the promotion.
Proof that we finished the degree.
Proof that the years of doing without led somewhere.
Proof that we can make it through something awful.
My mom's Green Stamp books were proof.
Every filled page said, I'm getting closer.
The Sunbeam mixer was proof.
And that piano was proof of something much bigger.
That's what we can forget when we're standing on the selling side of the counter.
We see the object. We don't see everything that came before it.
The woman looking at an expensive handbag may have been saving for it for two years.
The guy buying a watch may be celebrating 25 years at the same company.
The young couple buying a sofa may be furnishing the first home they've ever owned.
The kid buying a suit may be starting his first real job.
And the schoolteacher buying a piano may have spent two years teaching seventh graders all day and attending college four nights a week because a master's degree meant a raise and a better life for her sons.
You don't know, you simply don't know.
Things have prices. People give them value.
Sometime soon, someone may walk into the estate sale and see my mom's piano.
They'll see a used Kohler & Campbell console.
Maybe they'll press a few keys.
Maybe they'll feel the scars across C, D, E, and more.
Maybe they'll look at the price and decide whether it's worth $100.
They won't know about the Green Stamps.
They won't know about the sacred little sponge on its red pad.
They won't know about the Sunbeam mixer or the sticky bread dough.
They won't know about the half gallon of real milk mixed with powdered milk.
They won't know about that heavy Singer sewing machine at the kitchen table.
They won't know about Mrs. Lehaney's white Dodge Valiant sitting outside the University of Toledo on a freezing winter night.
They won't know about a woman who had already taught school all day walking into another classroom four nights a week.
They won't know about the master's degree.
They won't know she wanted to be a singer.
They won't know about Waves of the Ocean.
They won't know about the brave face.
They won't know about the bow and arrow.
They won't know about the beige bucket of Pine-Sol.
They won't know about the yardstick.
They won't know about the piano lessons I skipped.
They won't know about the 18 letters I sent to Broadway conductors.
They'll just hear an old, out-of-tune piano.
I tried giving it away for free.
No takers.
And maybe that's okay.
Maybe someone will buy it.
Maybe there will be a child in that house.
Maybe that child will take lessons.
Maybe they'll hate practicing.
Maybe they'll love it.
Maybe someone will open the bench and find what I'm leaving inside: the sheet music for Waves of the Ocean, and a few of her soprano solos.
Maybe they'll play it again.
Maybe that piano will become part of somebody else's story.
I hope so. Because I don't need to own the piano to keep what my mother gave me.
I have it.
I've had it all along.
It was never really the piano.
It was the opportunity.
It was the sacrifice.
It was the example of a woman who kept going.
It was sitting in a cold Dodge Valiant waiting for her without understanding why she was late.
And finally, all these years later, understanding.
My mom's piano is worth about $100.
At least, that's what they tell me it's worth now.
To someone else.
To me, its value can't be measured.
And maybe that's the final lesson it has left to teach me.
Sometimes we buy proof.
Sometimes we inherit it.
And sometimes, after it has given us everything it has to give, we can let it go.