My sister, my brother, and I took piano lessons from a blind woman for three years. Miss
Love lived with her mother in a simple, white frame house, and her piano was in the front parlor.
She was a stern teacher who demanded the best of her young students and had a low tolerance
for any foolishness. Mother hoped that one of us would eventually become a teen prodigy
playing hymns and gospel songs for her friends at church. I was 11 when we started lessons.
“It must be awful to be blind,” I said to my mom.
“Miss Love probably doesn’t think of it as awful,” my mom replied.
“But she can’t see anything,” I protested.
“She sees more than you think. She sees things we don’t see with our eyes.”
I thought about seeing without eyes, but being a concrete thinker, I dismissed it as
Momspeak.
When we knocked on her front door each week, Miss Love answered the door and
greeted us, then walked to her seat next to the piano without the aid of her white cane. I always
suspected that she could see just a little.
We sat in the parlor on a sofa covered with clear plastic and waited our turn. I quickly
learned to go first because it was no fun listening to Jeff, my 9-year-old brother, as he struggled
through his thirty minutes to find notes and plink out simple tunes I’d learned years earlier. After
my lesson was over, my mother allowed me to take her keys and return to the car, where I could
find my favorite AM station and listen to the top forty tunes of the mid-sixties: The Beatles, The
Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Temptations. This was my music, not Chopin, Schubert, or
Beethoven. My parents disapproved of rock and roll, so I had to keep watch and turn off the
radio before my mom returned to the car.
2
Miss Love did not teach pop music.
She would tell me each week that I needed to practice more. I had talent, but I was lazy. I
sometimes made a face at her, and my little brother would giggle. Miss Love would ask him
what was funny, and Jeff always pointed at me and said, “Jack.”
For a blind woman, Miss Love could direct a mean glare my way.
Margie, my sister, who was three years older than me, tried the hardest. She often got her
feelings hurt and sometimes teared up when Miss Love criticized her progress. Margie was the
only one of us who diligently practiced each day for thirty minutes, as demanded by Miss Love
and our mother. I usually spent my required thirty minutes at the piano each day banging out the
chords to “House of the Rising Sun” and other pop tunes with the familiar 1-4-5 chord
progressions. Margie taught me how to play Chopsticks and Heart and Soul, which seems to be
the only piano prowess I’ve retained after those years of lessons.
Our family attended a fundamentalist church that frowned on listening to the devil’s
music or dancing since it appealed to the lust of the flesh. An older teenager once told me that his
dad said jokingly that the preacher was against fornication because it could lead to dancing. It
was years later before I understood the irony in that joke.
The preacher also railed against the popular movies of the day because they showed
women in skimpy attire and encouraged sinful activity like drinking and smoking, so we never
went to the movie theater. Of course, that description made movies and theaters even more
alluring to an adolescent boy.
One spring night, I sat in the car outside Miss Love’s house with the ignition turned on,
listening to the radio while reading a comic book by the interior dome light. Suddenly the dome
light faded, and the radio went silent. A few minutes later, when my mother tried to start her ten-
3
year-old Plymouth Station Wagon to no avail, I was sternly scolded for running down the
battery. Mother returned to Miss Love’s front door, called my father, and a half-hour later,
battery cables in hand, he grumpily showed up to help get us home. My evenings of listening to
the radio in the car were done.
Across the street from Miss Love’s house was a drive-in theater. The large outdoor
screen was visible from her front porch, so when spring turned into summer, I started hanging
out on her front stoop and watching the movie on the screen. Since I couldn’t hear the dialogue,
my imagination was fed by the actors’ movements and their environment.
Looking back, I think the movie I saw for several weeks that summer was “Days of Wine
and Roses.” I could only watch an hour, and it was the same hour each week. I remember Jack
Lemmon and a gorgeous woman I later learned was Lee Remick. I was entranced by how he
kissed her and how she snuggled against him. As the weeks passed, I paid more attention to their
beautiful clothes, fancy penthouse apartment, and the dinner parties with martinis and wine.
To a thirteen-year-old boy, just entering adolescence with the accompanying fantasies of
girls and romance, they were the essence of success and sophistication. I didn’t see the rest of the
movie, so I didn’t know about their descent into alcoholism and the demise of their marriage. If
there were clues in the hour I watched, I missed them. The glamorous life I saw on the big screen
blinded me.
When I turned fourteen, I begged my mother to let me quit piano lessons. I played the
trombone in the school band, and our high school band often had after-school practices and
weekend performances that sucked up my free time for piano practice. Mom reluctantly gave up
on her dream of me becoming an accomplished pianist who could play hymns at church.
4
In tenth grade, I quit band and tried out for the junior varsity basketball team, and
because I was tall, I made the team. Barry, my new best friend, also made the team. Barry’s mom
picked us up after practice in her sky-blue Cadillac Deville, and we hung out at Barry’s house
until my dad came to get me on his way home from work.
Barry lived in a sprawling modern home on a landscaped hillside in the part of Nashville
where the doctors, lawyers, and rich folks lived. I was in awe of the white silk brocade couch and
chairs in their front living room and the oriental rugs over parquet wood floors. A large oil
portrait of Barry’s mom hung above the fireplace. Their den had walnut paneling, hunting prints
on the walls, beige shag carpet, and a giant color TV. Barry’s father owned an insurance firm and
drove a large black Mercedes.
I was envious of Barry, his big, beautiful house, and his doting parents. I also loved his
devil-may-care attitude and his easy, crooked grin.
I often stayed overnight on Friday nights. Barry’s parents always went to the Belle
Meade Country Club for dinner, and they left us money to order delivery pizza from a nearby
Pizza Hut. I watched his mother, with her ash-blond hair perfectly coiffed, her gold and diamond
jewelry, her silk or wool high fashion dress, give Barry an air kiss so as not to muss up her
lipstick. I thought she looked like Lee Remick. I loved my mom, but she didn’t have designer
dresses or wear much makeup. She looked like, well, a mother.
When I occasionally stayed over on a school night, I learned that at 5 PM, Barry’s mother
fixed herself a martini, lit a cigarette, and watched the news in the den. After the news hour, she
would fix herself a second martini, then drag a few TV dinner options for us from the
5
refrigerator. Barry’s parents had their dinner a couple of hours later when his dad arrived home. I
was never sure what she served to him, but it didn’t seem like TV dinners.
Barry would occasionally spend Friday night at our house. We weren’t poor, but our
brick rancher was modest and, with six kids, crowded. When Mom announced dinner was ready,
we all had a place at the table, including any friends. We held hands as Daddy said grace, then
Mom passed the food, reminding some of us to put our napkins in our lap and keep our elbows
off the table.
Dinner at our house was usually southern comfort food: meatloaf, green beans, mashed
potatoes, gravy, sometimes pot roast, often chicken casserole. Barry always complimented my
mother on the meal, and he seemed sincere because he would tell our friends that my mom was
the best cook ever.
He told me once that my parents seemed to love each other. When I gave him a quizzical
look, he said, “Your dad always kisses your mom when he comes in the house.” He added,
“Your mom sure hugs you all a lot. Hell, she even hugs me.”
I remember peeking into Barry’s parents’ bedroom and being surprised at twin beds,
though the furniture was beautiful teak wood. I was impressed that they had a TV in their
bedroom.
Barry’s father usually watched TV at night in the den with us. He would drop into his
favorite leather chair, place his dark liquor drink on the side table, and light a cigarette. He
turned the TV channel to The Tonight Show at ten-thirty and told us it was time for bed. As we
walked down the hall to Barry’s room, I could hear Johnny Carson’s voice through the closed
bedroom door to his parent’s room.
6
Barry and I didn’t try out for the varsity basketball team our junior year because we knew
we weren’t good enough. Barry’s dad gave him a Ford Mustang for his sixteenth birthday in
October. It was British Racing Green, with a white vinyl top. We spent most Friday nights
circling through the Shoney’s Drive-in, honking at friends, and ogling the girls. I may have
reached a peak in my cool factor just by riding shotgun in Barry’s Mustang. His curfew was
midnight, so we cruised all the teen hangout spots, often staying late with teens older than us.
That year I learned to lie to my parents. I wanted to go to high school dances and parties,
but I knew our church frowned on those, so I lied about our activities, and my parents trusted me.
After all, I was active in our church youth group, and our Pastor said I was an example of a fine
Christian young man.
Barry often had a beer from his dad’s stash between his knees when he pulled into my
driveway and honked. If I stayed with him on a Friday night, I would sneak a sip of beer at a
party or while we were driving around.
I could only stay out till eleven o’clock on Saturday nights. I had to be home because we
all went to church on Sunday morning. I didn’t drink beer on Saturday nights because I couldn’t
risk coming home and having alcohol on my breath.
My mother stayed awake until I was home at eleven on Saturdays. She would call out and
wish me good night when I passed their slightly open bedroom door. Their bedroom was next to
the room I shared with Jeff, and I sometimes heard their low voices at night. Some nights I also
listened to my mother’s sighs. I know now that those sighs, and six kids spread over eighteen
years, meant their marriage remained passionate well into their middle-aged years and probably a
lot longer.
7
By the following summer, Barry didn’t have a curfew, and when we came back to his
house, usually after midnight, we often heard the murmur of the TV in the den accompanied by
his dad’s snores in his leather chair. Barry said we didn’t need to worry about waking him since
he was probably drunk.
I was slow to see the cracks in Barry’s perfect life. We were besties, pals forever, and I
loved him like a brother. At first, I was blind to his excesses, but now, on Friday nights, I told
him I was driving us to his house if I thought he had too many beers. He would grin his crooked
grin and hand me the car keys. Sometimes when I drove us to my house on Saturday nights, he
passed out in the passenger seat. He rallied when I shook him awake and assured me that he was
okay to drive home, but I knew he would go looking for action somewhere: a party, the parking
lot of a teen hangout, or just circle back through Shoney’s to see if some of our friends were still
there after the Drive-In closed.
Later that summer, Barry totaled his Mustang in a single-car crash. It happened after a
party on a Saturday night at the house of a popular senior girl. He should have had his driver’s
license suspended for underage drinking and driving drunk, but his dad had connections, and
there were no consequences.
Barry spent two nights in the hospital with cuts, bruises, and a broken arm. After he went
home, I went to see him, and he told me that his parents were sending him to a military prep
school in Virginia for his senior year when school started back up. We promised to stay in touch.
I saw Barry the following summer when he returned home for a few weeks. He was
thinner, with short hair and a furtive look about him. He’d taken up smoking. He told me he had
enrolled at the University of Virginia for that fall.
“Why Virginia?” I asked.
8
“It’s my dad’s alma mater,” he answered. “My grades are better now, and they give
preferential admission to alumni kids.”
My dad told me I could go to any college that would accept me, but it needed to be an
instate school if he was paying for it. I chose the University of Tennessee. During my freshman
year, Barry and I wrote a few letters, and then we didn’t.
I plowed through my college years at UT, graduated with a degree in Psychology,
returned home, and landed a job with a child welfare agency. I was at a restaurant with my
girlfriend, celebrating my new job, when I saw Barry at the bar. He waved at me, lit another
cigarette, and came over. His hair was long, over his ears and collar, and his eyes looked older
than his twenty-three years.
After backslaps and introductions, he said that he was the assistant manager at a liquor
store that a friend of his father owned. “Liquor stores make a lot of money,” he told me. “I think
I can do well there, maybe have my own store someday.”
He’d dropped out of UVA after his second year. “Too much partying,” he said. “My dad
wasn’t willing to pay for college if I didn’t make decent grades.” He said he managed to stay out
of the army because of a favorable draft number, and he hung around Charlottesville for a couple
of years, staying afloat by tending bar. He’d just returned to Nashville a few months ago.
“How are your mom and dad?” I asked. Barry reached across our table to stub out his
cigarette before answering. I noticed his hand tremored a little. “They split up three years ago.
Mom kept the house. I’m staying with her, trying to save up to buy my own place.”
9
His familiar crooked grin appeared. “My old man has a bachelor pad downtown, and his
former secretary lives with him. She’s about ten years younger than him. I hear she’s pretty, but
I’ve not met her. Don’t see him much either.”
I didn’t know how to respond. He said to say hello to my parents, slapped me on the back
again, nodded at my girl, and walked away.
“That’s the famous Barry, the one you always talk about?” my girlfriend said.
I nodded. “He’s different now.” I paused, then added, “Though maybe not so much.”
I once was blind, but now I could see.