Small and Simple Things
MY BREASTS ACHED WITH THE TENDERNESS of sudden milk, and my first baby—my Chloe—stirred in my arms. Our bishop was over for a visit, and I felt tired. And frazzled. And overwhelmed by unfamiliar motherhood. He knew this and reassured me with a pat on the shoulder that he would hold off in giving me a calling. As Chloe began to cry, the bishop rose to leave and noticed our piano, stately on the small wall it occupied. He stopped and turned back toward me, “Do you play the piano?” he asked.
“I do,” I said, disappointed that I could cave so easily.
“Well, then yes, Sister Benton, actually, we do have a calling for you.”
That Sunday, I was called and set apart as the Primary pianist. As it was announced in sacrament meeting, I stood for the vote and attempted a smile as my cheeks burned and my eyes focused on a pink spring bouquet at the podium. I stood filled with reluctance as doubt rang out in my head: how will I do this with a newborn who still clings to me, who still nurses when she pleases? I felt the solid pit of nervousness settle in my stomach, its acrid taste a perfect match for the memories returning to my mind.
It seemed a long time ago and I was a child. Spring was in bloom, with bulbs that lined the walkway up to the music building at the university. I brought my sheet music with me as a formality. Although I had the three pieces memorized, my judge would need to follow along with the music as I played. So I held fast to those papers, their crisp edges wilting in my sweaty palm.
When my judge opened the door to let me in, I felt dizzy as I stood and took the two steps toward him. He attempted a half smile but looked stuffy and hot in his sports coat, and his eyes seemed as tired as mine felt. This was the last part of a three-fold exam that had taken all morning. I’d already finished ear training and a written test, and I plopped myself on the piano bench as though my body was sighing—I just wanted to get this over with.
He was all business as well, and clearing his throat said, “We’ll start easy . . . How about G minor.” I played a G minor scale. “E flat major.” Done. “F major.” He quizzed me on my cadences, my chord progressions in specific keys, and handed me a thin sheet of paper to sight-read, the scrawled notes of a sonatina simple enough to get through. And only after this was it time to play my memorized music: the music I had worked so hard on throughout the year, the music that my teacher said proved diversity, range.
“Okay, Brooke,” he said, “let’s start with the Bach.”
“Okay, Brooke,” I repeated to myself, “start.” A pause. I silently willed my fingers to start. They were poised to start—I know it—and they seemed to be on the right keys. Eventually I pounded out something feeble and felt a disconcerting flush. After sixteen measures, I forgot and had to restart. Sixteen measures again, and again I forgot. Hot panic rose in me, my forehead felt sweaty, my palms slippery. My fingers grew roots that climbed up my arms. I could barely move, let alone whisper from trembling lips, “I can’t remember it.” As I peeked at him over my right shoulder, I didn’t look at his face, because I couldn’t bear to recognize disappointment in his eyes. I stared instead at his white dress shirt, the buttons forced across his belly, and I focused on the taut crease that moved as he spoke: “Perhaps you would like to use your music.”
Perhaps. Yes, perhaps. And I didn’t want to give it back either, for suddenly it felt familiar and necessary in my clutch. He gave me a few moments, and then stretched his hand the distance between us to extract the sheet music from mine. I tried the Bach piece again. I failed.
He laid the music on the piano for me. He didn’t say a word because he didn’t need to. I knew that it was too late to impress. I knew that he would write this on my commentary, and I knew my teacher’s dismay before my Wednesday lesson arrived.
The inquiry started with a look of disbelieving that tumbled into a flabbergasted sputter: “WHY did you use your music?” She waited for an answer, but I could only shrug back while a string of sub-par excuses rang out in my mind: Because I just forgot, because it’s not easy for me, because I am eleven and don’t want to do this, because . .
Because. Because now I see how I was lacking in a setting such as this. Because now I know that I can get myself through a piece of music for utility’s sake, but the talent, the innate musicality, the piano-bench-sway, the closed eyes, the passion—all of that escaped me and made performances fraught with insecurity and heart palpitations. Years went by and the glaze of forgetting coaxed my fingers into still relishing the touch of the piano in a very un-musician like way: in my home only, and just for fun.
But a piano is too big a thing to hide from a visiting bishop, and my ward suddenly needed a pianist. So I accepted the calling regardless of the misgivings that took shape inside me. I felt emotional and overwhelmed in motherhood—Chloe was so new! I felt hopeless remembering what I really was: the girl who never played the piano that well, who disappointed her piano teachers every week. They seemed to care about the unfathomable, like the math problem that became one of my very first lessons. At the age of six, I sat at my piano teacher’s feet while she attempted to explain the concept of “fourths” to me by deconstructing a piece of fruit into quarters. I wanted so badly to understand what she meant, but only wondered over and over what that orange had to do with my lesson, with learning to play music.
But then again, maybe I never learned to truly play music. Of the soul-stirring variety—music that changes hearts and minds, that causes one to pause and sway, that unravels a mystery and strikes a chord. I wondered if I had ever been a true musician.
On my first Sunday as the Primary pianist, the presidency tried to quell my nervousness with the words they thought I needed: “The children don’t care,” they assured. “The children don’t know better.” But they could do little to disguise the fact that they were writing me off. Which was okay. This was my own fear to conquer. And though it appeared small to some, for me it was behemoth and scary, and I would have to go at it alone.
I said a quick prayer before I began, and touched the keys lightly as the first stirrings of prelude music found their way into the palpable humidity of early spring: “I Feel My Savior’s Love.” And suddenly I did. So I pushed the keys harder and the notes came with ease, as Chloe seemed snug and content in her carrier, her world unaltered by my new calling. For “This Is My Beloved Son,” a song I’d never heard before, I dropped my left hand and struggled through the melody. During “Popcorn Popping” my baby cried, the forced, unembarrassed cry of a newborn, and was scooped into the arms of a kind sister and whisked away down the hall. I flubbed my fingering on the keys and lost concentration as that cry became a wail, and as that wail slowly faded, moving away from me. But I finished, and I left church that day floating, the colors outside dazzling.
Spring bloomed before us—first my tulips and then my forsythia—and Primary songs became the soundtrack for the week as I dug in the garden, as I nursed, as I cuddled and changed diapers—the timbre of my voice fascinating to my baby, the notes in my head unceasing. And I felt confident I could do this calling; I knew Sunday number two would be better.
It was. There were still baby tears and missed notes, but my fingering was solid and Chloe settled in with a Primary counselor and a bottle. I laughed with the kids as we raced each other on an overly fast rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” (they won) and my heart sang along as their voices pealed, “I’m glad that I live in this beautiful world, for I know Heavenly Father loves me” (a personal favorite). By playing the piano, I was doing what I said I couldn’t, and it seemed enough.
But it wasn’t. I received the most impossible request later that day: to play two songs for the stake Primary choir during the upcoming week’s stake conference. I felt sick. My husband would be out of town—who would watch my baby? How, in exactly six days, would I learn two songs? And if I happened to learn those two songs, how would I be able to play in front of hundreds of grown-ups (and certainly at least one musician in the bunch) that sang well, that listened, that harmonized? There would be no way to hide a mistake, no way to just play right-handed, and I felt it completely plausible in this state of anxiety that I would walk up to the big baby grand on the stand in a very full stake center and forget how to play the piano, the keys’ distinctions no longer black and white, but gray, the notes in front of me indecipherable characters.
As I made my way through the music that week and prayed for the strength to not pass out on Sunday, preparations for Chloe’s upcoming blessing were a welcome distraction. My heart was full and my mind wandered to the heavenly as I stared at the pink bundle of baby before me. Her face was slack in its slumber, her cheeks flushed with the silken blush of sleep, her lips pursed in a small bud blooming drool. Here she was: a miracle, a gift—given to me by a loving Heavenly Father. My heart was raw with gratitude, such inadequacy to give back, and on my knees I considered this: for all my Heavenly Father does for me, surely I can do one little thing for Him. And if He needed me at stake conference, I was determined to try.
So I tried.
And here’s what happened: I didn’t black out and fall off the piano bench; I didn’t forget how to play the piano; I made it through two songs, multiple verses; and amazingly, amazingly, Chloe slept like a baby, the entire time. It was by no means a flawless performance. But it was done, and I did it.
I felt immense relief at the blessing of trying and not failing. But as I glimpsed the first traces of my learning, scratched upon on the endless opus that would become my life, I don’t think I realized the magnitude of the true blessing that my Heavenly Father bestowed upon me. For though the markings appeared faintly and in the most unassuming of callings, a few Sundays later I could see how those traces formed a more divine composition.
It was Chloe’s blessing day. And I watched as my husband walked to the front of the chapel with our baby held in his arms, the skirt of her long gown a whispering swish of raw silk against his legs. I watched as he held her along her back and the ceiling of priesthood holders closed in and hovered above her. And then I shut my eyes and heard him bless her, and how he seemed to be offering her, and yet asking in return.
While he spoke I peeked at the picture of them, of father blessing child: the edges seemed dodged and blurry through my squinting eyes, the image hinting sepia in the yellowed light cast from the chapel’s pendant lamps. As I begged the vision to remain, I was struck by a single, resonant thought—how my Heavenly Father blessed me with my baby girl while also requiring back of me: if I was willing to sacrifice sleep and love and emotion for my baby, He would be willing to bless me with a family; if I played the piano, He would take away my fear.
And only then did I seem to hear a melody start up, then fill with a harmonizing accompaniment as the duet between my Heavenly Father and me rang aloud. He was helpless without my willingness to attempt the song, and all of us, my whole little family, were players—caught up in the ability to bless and be blessed.
