For the Sender: Four Letters. Twelve Songs. One Story. by Alex Woodard

Author:Alex Woodard [Woodard, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Family & Relationships, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Music, Composers & Musicians, Psychology, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Printed Music, Psychotherapy
ISBN: 9781401941215
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

T H E S E A R C H

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T h e S e a r c h

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Long Beach, California, has a particular smell. It is the smell of my childhood, strong with exhaust from the street traffic on Park Avenue and vapors from the evening dew evaporating in the midmorning sun. I can feel the heat coming off the stucco on the 1930s Spanish-style houses in my old neighborhood as I wait for my grandma to answer the door to her duplex, just across the street from where I grew up.

She opens the door with wet eyes that tell me she’s either been sleeping or crying. I hug and kiss her on the way in, and before long she asks me if I have seen the new back office.

I have seen it, sat in it, and talked with her in it for the last couple of years, but she can’t remember those kinds of things anymore.

We are waiting for her old Steck player piano to be delivered from my house in Seattle, the house that used to be my home but is now sitting empty save the scorch marks and darkness left in the addicts’ wake. Her piano followed me north to Seattle and is now following me back to Southern California and a temporary resting place in her duplex. I have played and written songs on that piano since I was a boy, when I would spend Saturday nights at Grandma’s house, sleeping in the twin bed next to her and pounding out chords with tiny fists after Bisquick pancakes on Sunday mornings.

“I’ll see you in a little while,” she says as she shuffles off to take a nap. She is hardly moving at all now, but soon enough she will be confined to her bed forever, wearing diapers and breaking For the Sender interior.indd 63

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F O R T H E S E N D E R

into songs like “It’s 3 O’clock in the Morning” mid-sentence.

I walk back into the living room where Kona is also napping, waking only to thump her tail in acknowledgment before falling back into her own dreams.

I hear the moving truck’s air brakes pumping out on Park Avenue and walk to the window in time to see the piano roll-ing down the truck’s ramp. A melody wanders into my mind, and I remember writing a song for my grandma on that piano just before they loaded it onto the truck in Seattle. I called it

“The Invitation,” because my grandma has been dying for years, and I feel like she’s been holding in her hands an invitation to get into heaven, but for some reason God won’t let her into the party.

The movers lug the piano into the house, and by the time they position it in the corner, both Kona and my grandma wake up from their naps. I sign for the delivery, and after some wandering conversation, I get my grandma a glass of milk, give her a hug, and put Kona in my truck.

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