Snapshot: Eulogy Part I

Two little girls in pink tutus sitting in mini rocking chairs. The chairs are a dark brown wood, the varnish frayed around the edges. Children's chairs. They are made for toddlers. The girls are maybe two years old. One has lighter hair, pulled back in a bun, wisps hanging out around her face. The other has darker hair pulled back in a pony tail. Both girls have straight hair and freckles. The chairs are side by side and the girls are leaning over to kiss each other on the lips, faces in profile. Best friends. Sisters. Little hands grip the arms of the chairs. They are on a dark brown carpet. They kind you have when you have a large family and can't let the stains show. Brown, orange, green, yellow, just enough splotches of color to keep the room from becoming too overwhelmingly dark. There is a piano in the background. An old up right. It too is brown. Or maybe one would say tan. We can just see the leg on one side. Beat up finish. The kind kids play on. If we could see the keys, we would see missing ivory on most of the keys. A few of the black keys broken and re-glued. Wooden keys. Crayon on some keys. The distinct nature of each key helps the kids keep track of where they are when they play Heart and Soul or that other song from Grandma O. This is a piano that is for a family that loves music. Sees music not as a special thing that special people do but as a part of living. Like breathing, some times music is there to just keep you going. Not to be performed but just to be. It is a part of you. You eat, you sleep, you breathe, you tinker away at the piano. But we don't know this from the picture. We just see a leg of the piano, beat up finish. We don't know that this piano was bought for $1 from the church. We don't know that for parents who struggled for years trying to give their kids something special, this was a bit of heaven. Maybe the most tangible bit of heaven received from the Catholic church.

As for the girls in the picture, they preferred to dance to records.