One day, when I was about five years old, my mama found this piano on the side of the road. She recruited friends to haul it back to our falling-down farmhouse, and then just like that, we had a piano. She played it, I played it a little, and when he visited, my crazy Swedish grandfather played it a lot.
We were very poor when she found that piano. My father still slept on our downstairs couch because he had nowhere to go after the divorce. We scrounged clothing for free from the Rescue Mission. I had sores in the corners of my mouth from malnutrition. You know, that kind of poor.
My nutty mom, my sardonic dad with the Brooklyn accent, my grandparents, friends from church, they would all gather in our kitchen with their guitars and pipes and jokes, and they would talk and smoke and play games of penny poker and laugh and laugh. I would lie on my back under the glass table, between pairs of feet, and watch the cards and coins move across the surface above. Later on my grandfather would crank out tunes on the red piano, and we would dance and sing.