By Michelle Gubbay
PROMPT—No one noticed ...
No one noticed Lenny, but then all of a sudden Lenny began to play the piano.
I had no idea that he could play.
He was Sonny’s cousin, sometimes would appear on the scene with Sonny, awkward, full of large teeth and eyeglasses and self-deprecating jokes, hands too large and ears too large, the ugly duckling who never grew into transformative grace.
I knew he was there, when he came with Sonny – but I didn’t see him, not really. Who was he? I never saw past the externals, the clumsy goofiness of a grown kid.
Then one time – this is a story from years ago – a group of five or six of us were at someone’s house. I don’t remember whose, it wasn’t someone I knew well. I’ve forgotten everything but this:
We were in the kitchen, smoking weed.
Suddenly, from another room, the sound of piano jazz. A sparkling-clear cascade of notes, free, leaping – now soaring, now descending in a waterfall and then climbing again, racing through shimmering rays of the sun.
We all stopped – stopped talking, stopped drinking, stopped laughing, stopped passing round the joint. Transfixed, we stood there, listening.
“That’s Lenny,” Sonny said.
At first I didn’t believe him.
Lenny?
All the elegance and grace that Lenny wasn’t, the lightness of touch, the complexity of rhythm.
I went into the next room. There he was.
Lenny, at the piano.
What did I know?
Nothing.
What do I know, now?
Did that experience teach me, once and for all, how little we know about another, how limited our assumptions might be?
Michelle Gubbay has centered the many decades of her life on social justice activism and creative writing. Since 2013, she has been with InsideOUT Writers in Los Angeles, leading weekly expressive writing sessions with incarcerated youth. Michelle writes from Los Angeles, CA.
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