I received email from Cindy Behney about yesterday’s post to fill me in about the Fromms.

Harvey and Ethel Fromm lived up the street from me. I took piano lessons from her.

Fast forward… My husband bought our family an electric piano probably in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I was extremely thrilled with this surprise Christmas gift.

I immediately dug out my old piano music and began playing once again. I decided to write a thank you note to Mrs. Fromm for teaching me how to play the piano. 

I got a lengthy, handwritten letter in return. She remembered me, in fact, she still had the Christmas candle stick holders I gave her. She was also a big collector of salt/pepper shakers. 

At the end of the letter, she told me they were both in an extremely bad car accident and she was bedridden. Harvey was writing the letter for her. She could no longer write. 

Fast forward again, she was in the same nursing home as my mother-in-law. I went to visit her, but she had no recollection of me. I think she ended up with dementia. She just stared at me. So sad, broke my heart.

And with that information I found an obituary for Mrs. Fromm: Ethel Fromm 1912 – 2007

I also got a note from my sister Donna.

Apparently she too took lessons for a brief time from Mrs. Fromm, something that I did not know or did not recall, so I guess my parents didn’t hold a grudge against the Fromms as I speculated. I just don’t recall them ever mentioning the Fromms or ever suggesting that I take lessons from Mrs. Fromm when I needed a piano teacher.

My sister went on to suggest that I was somehow a more serious piano student than she was, because she didn’t practice.

Well, I certainly didn’t practice much myself, as I wrote about previously.

In fact, I was the assistant pianist at our church for years, which meant that I accompanied the lower grades in Sunday School in singing one hymn during their service. And I hated it. Because I was never prepared.

Now playing a hymn is one of the easiest pieces to play on a keyboard because it’s just a slow succession of chords, almost always in one of the relatively easy keys. Skim through any hymnal and you’ll find that nearly all the hymns are in the keys of C, F, and B-flat. Those are the keys with zero, one, and two flats in their key signatures. There might be a few more in E-flat (three flats) and some in G (one sharp) but I doubt that you’ll find too many in any of the more difficult keys. For some reason the flat keys are easier for most keyboard players to handle. (I haven’t looked at a hymnal for over 50 years, so if I’m misremembering the relative frequency of the key signatures, please let me know. 😉)

Anyway, I knew perhaps two hymns that I would recycle over and over, and I’d always be embarrassed because I’d just never practice any new ones during the week, so I’d always play one of those two every time it was my turn to play. So I hated being the assistant pianist, because I never practiced any new hymns.

Even now, though my piano playing abilities have atrophied over the years from disuse, I suspect that ten or fifteen minutes at the keyboard would be enough to get me up to snuff with some of the easier hymns. “Rock of Ages, Cleft for me…”