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How to Build a Piano Bench

Lessons for Success from a Red-Dirt Road in Alabama

River Grove Books

A STREET PAVED with ALABAMA RED CLAY

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Growing Up with Advantages

"You're going to get off Petain Street. You'll get your education, and you're going to amount to something." That was the commandment Daddy gave me. And I did it. I amounted to something — but only because of the lessons I took with me from the street he made sure I would leave.

Paved with Alabama red clay and lined with the old yellow houses built for the paper mills' workers in the early 1900s, Petain Street was in Prichard, a blue-collar town in Mobile County. I grew up there in the '50s with all the advantages a child could have — the freedom of safety, working-class people with working-class values, and time to waste. Everybody knew everybody on Petain Street and watched out for each other, so I was free to go about and talk to neighbors, mostly laborers, factory workers, and lots of old people who were retired and had time to spend on a child. And Mama and Daddy worked long days, so I had time to waste.

I had time to spend learning people. As far back as I remember, and I remember just about everything, I was a watcher, a listener, and a gatherer. I soaked up everything I saw on Petain Street — the people, stories, feelings, and scenes of worn, lived-in landscapes in colors running from dusty taupe and khaki to bright orange and red — even the different ways the air felt and smelled, and I held on to it to use whenever I'd need to. The street was full of storytellers, not just Daddy, Mama, and Grandmama, but all of the old folks who lived in the other mill houses. I listened and gathered up their stories and saved them for later. I was a kid, so I listened like a kid — just heard them and accepted them at face value, without passing judgment.

That was one of my first and most important lessons. People have stories to tell and they love to tell them — and will do most anything for a person who listens and doesn't judge them. I listened, so they talked. They told me about funerals and weddings, happy times, things that hurt them, things they were ashamed of.

What I didn't know then, and wouldn't figure out for what seemed a whole lot of years, was that at eight years old I was already training for the career that would keep me off of Petain Street. I was going to be a gatherer of images and words, and a listener to people who would tell me all I needed to know so I could amount to something.

But then I found out the world wasn't just made up of people. It was made up of groups of people. And when they got together, they weren't people anymore. They were a group, and I was the little girl who was on the outside, looking in, and scared to join in. I was five years old the first time I met one of these impenetrable groups.

Right after I graduated from kindergarten, Mama and Daddy packed up and moved me away from Grandmama's house on Petain Street to an apartment in Wharton, Texas. My brother had moved to Houston after he married Leona, and Mama and Daddy wanted to be near them and their new baby, Will.

Our apartment was over a feed store that sold chickens and all kinds of farm tools. Mama and Daddy worked six days a week, and there were no other children living in the building, so I spent my time watching the chickens or playing by myself on the little grass strip beside the store. I was so happy when I met a little girl who lived in a house on the street that backed up to our apartment building. We played together all afternoon. As she was leaving to go home, she said she was having a birthday party on Saturday and I was invited. Mama had to work on Saturday, but that was okay, I could walk there by myself.

Saturday afternoon I got dressed and went to her house. I climbed the steps to her porch. The party had started. I could hear children laughing inside. But I didn't knock on the door. I just stood there, frozen on the porch, for a long time, scared and sad, wanting her mother to find me and yet afraid she would at the same time. Then I went home.

I didn't know it then, but I'd never be comfortable in a group. People were fine one at a time. But groups judged you for being poor, for being dumb, for being from the wrong town — for everything. When I was in a group, I'd get a strange feeling of being apart — not fully part of the scene, but standing just outside, looking in at the other people and at myself, too. It was weird to be outside of myself, watching me and seeing myself wanting to be part of it, but unable to cross the barrier.

After first grade, we moved back to 13 East Petain Street and to Grandmama and the people I knew on the street that I'd someday be successful enough to get off, which meant finding a career. But with a world full of groups that I was pretty sure wouldn't like me and would judge me, if I was going to get off of Petain Street, it would have to be in a career that didn't put me in the middle of a group. I'd have to find one that would let me be with people, like the ordinary people on Petain Street, who appreciated having me there to listen — one at a time. I would finally find that career in sales at a staffing business (called a personnel agency back then), selling to clients and interviewing candidates one-on-one.

Another lesson I learned from my story gathering was that people who didn't look as though their lives would be all that interesting actually had exciting, funny, or poignant stories to tell. The people who I grew up around sent me into the world expecting people, all kinds of people, to have stories to tell me and expecting them to value me for listening.

One of the biggest advantages to growing up on Petain Street was that I had time to waste. This was a time and a place when parents were too busy supporting us children to worry about entertaining us. I had time enough to be bored, bored enough to become creative in ways to fill the time. We weren't the poorest on the street. At least we never had to eat Spam — that's where Daddy drew the poverty line. But we still couldn't afford to waste money on a lot of extras or after-school activities like tap dance lessons, which Mama couldn't have gotten time off work to take me to anyway. And besides that, it was against her religion. So, except for the thirty minutes a week I spent taking piano lessons (that Mama would put aside five dollars to pay for), and aside from the ten or fifteen minutes a day I practiced (and stretched to "an hour" when I told Mama), I had time to waste, time to wonder, time to figure things out for myself.

I had time to develop curiosity about the things I saw and the things I read in books. When I was six we got a television. We had two channels (5 and 10) to choose from, and sometimes we watched channel 3, but it had either a picture or sound, never both at once, because it was broadcast all the way from Pensacola, Florida. Television gave me a view of all kinds of fascinating places where different people lived exciting lives. I wanted to be a part of that world.

I spent a lot of my time alone. I didn't mind. That's when I did my dreaming, and the dreams became the goals I'd shoot for. I imagined how it would be someday, when I'd be rich and successful and popular. I dreamed of myself with a brilliant and elegant man. He would be rich, but I'd not be supported by him, or any man, or bossed by one. No, someday I'd have a career that would make me independent, so I could do whatever I wanted. Someday I'd buy clothes from stores I was afraid to even walk into then. Someday vacations wouldn't mean just going to visit kinfolks. I'd go all kinds of exciting places and I'd stay in hotels. I'd meet fantastic people. I'd be somebody, and I'd be a long, long way from Petain Street — just like Daddy said.

From the time I could understand, Daddy told me I had to get my education and get away from Petain Street and be somebody. I figured that meant have money and live in a fine house like the ones I saw in Mobile when we drove down the streets through the rich people's neighborhoods every spring to see the azaleas. Even our very street was dirt-poor — too poor to have cement the way Paper Mill Road, Wilson Avenue, and every other street did, even in Prichard. Petain Street was paved with red clay — Alabama red clay they called it, and seemed real proud of it. But I thought the only reason they gave our street the clay was because they couldn't do anything else with it. They sure couldn't farm it. I never saw a weed or blade work its way up through that clay. It turned to thick mud when it rained and squished up through my toes when I walked barefoot. Cars carved the mud into deep ruts that baked hard in the sun and gave off a fine red dust that every little breeze picked up and carried around the street, to turn the white houses, the curtains, the porch rockers, and my shorts a red-orange that Mama could never wash out. Every month or so the city sent an oil truck to slick down the road. That was supposed to hold down the red dust, but it only lasted till the next rain.

I looked up and down the street and saw two kinds of poor people. We were poor, but other people were really poor. I could tell the difference just by looking at the yards. Really poor yards didn't have grass, not even weeds, just dusty gray dirt, and sometimes a skinny dog or two. Most of the really poor on Petain Street lived down below the ditch, on the end of the street closest to the paper mills.

In the yards on our end of the street, things grew — grass, crepe myrtle trees, and me. I was happy on Petain Street. Funny, I thought, our street was dirt, but it had a curb made of cement, and a cement sidewalk too. I was happy sitting on the curb making animal figures out of the mud, happy sitting in the chinaberry in our backyard thinking, and happy listening to the old people tell stories about the little and big things in their lives that were important enough for them to tell to a little girl.

Eva May Simmons was my mother and the most important person in my life. Mama didn't think she was beautiful. And she wasn't beautiful in the Hollywood sense, but she had a face that never blemished and never aged, and she was proud of that. Every year at Mardi Gras and at the Mobile County Fair, they had a man who claimed he could guess your age or your weight, or you'd win a prize. Mama always let him try to guess her age. He never came close, but guessed ten or fifteen years too young. I always walked away with her prize.

Five feet two inches tall with brown eyes that laughed and a quick, sometimes mischievous smile, she didn't appear formidable, but she was. Mama had the strongest character and the most integrity of anybody I ever knew. She knew what she believed and fought for what she thought was right, whether it was a union for the workers in her grocery store, or to get a credit card in her own name when they were supposed to be issued to husbands only.

Mama set an example so high I would spend my life trying to live up to it. She didn't believe in excuses. She got things done and expected I would too. "Other children have excuses," she told me. "Other children don't have enough to eat and have to work after school or take care of little brothers and sisters. You don't have excuses." Mama gave me the drive that made me successful and took away any excuse to stop driving. That was a tough combination to live with because it never let me get to good enough.

I knew I had plenty of flaws, and I knew most of my flaws came from Daddy. He gave me the big personality I was never comfortable with and was part of what made me afraid of people. Daddy was a character. He was a tugboat captain who had done some prize fighting when he was young. Most anybody who knew him could have told you Norvelle G. Simmons's faults. He had been a womanizer until he got caught. He cussed, and chewed tobacco, and spit, and never went to church with Mama and me. I used to hate it when anyone said I was like him.

With all his flaws, Daddy was something special. He was smart and he was quick. And he was down-home, dirt-plain wise about people. He knew people and how they thought, and he taught me a lot of things I'd need later in my business and life. Maybe he didn't lead his life as well as he could have, and sometimes I resented his advice; but he never once told me a wrong thing to do.

Daddy was something else too. He was magnetic. He walked into a room and lit it up. People took notice. He had a movie-star handsome face with its strong chin and a nose inherited from his Native American ancestors. But it wasn't just his face, which was handsome enough to set women to touching up their rouge, or the sky-blue eyes that I'm glad were passed down to my children. He had wit, a bearing, and a huge personality that grabbed people. But the problem was he couldn't stop it. He never faded into a crowd. That's something else he passed on to me, and it's intimidated me all my life — the feeling that I could never blend in, that people were always watching me, judging me.

By the time I was eight years old, I had a clear picture of the life I wanted when I grew up. I drew it from the old movies on channel 5 that showed me how people lived in other places, exciting places, like New York City. They lived in elegant penthouses, rode in limousines, and wore beautiful clothes. That's what I'd do. The people on Petain Street wore the uniforms from their jobs, khakis in the garages, the mills, and the Alabama State Docks in Mobile, and nylon dresses in the grocery stores. I was going to wear clothes from the finest stores!

But those people in uniforms taught me what I'd need to know if I was going to get those fancy clothes. I was taught to run a business by people who never ran businesses. I learned to love the game and competition from people who never got to compete for the world's big prizes. Time after time, their words came back to me — their lessons made the difference between success and failure, and now, now I want to pass their lessons on.

One of the most valuable things they taught me was how to simplify. I built my career in a complex and fast-moving business. I spent most of the day on the phone, cold-calling and selling the company's recruiting service to employers at a pace you might see in a movie about Wall Street. When I wasn't on the phone, I was managing the process to get the jobs filled, which meant interviewing candidates, screening them, coordinating interviews for them, teaching them to interview, and closing deals. While I was balancing all of this and building my reputation in business, I had my share of life's complications crashing in at the same time. There were times I felt I was being dragged down into a whirlpool, but I was able to stop and take control because I'd learned the secret — from Daddy when he was building my piano bench. No matter how serious the problem, I can look back and remember what Daddy said: "There is always just one right next step. Find that and it's simple."

Life was simple for the people who lived in the old mill houses. They were clear about what was important — steady work, plenty to eat, school shoes for Billy and Gloria, to go to Heaven when they died. They couldn't afford to complicate things or borrow trouble by worrying about what might happen. They had to live in the moment, face their problems, solve them or mourn them, then go to bed and get some sleep so they could get up and go to work in the morning.

The lessons from my childhood were simple and clear — work hard, make no excuses, stay a steady course, live in the moment. And those lessons worked for me. I got off of Petain Street. But no matter how far I went, I never got far enough to be out of danger. It was always there, just behind me, chasing me, daring me to believe I was finally safe. But, if I looked back over my shoulder, I'd see it, gaining. On the heels of any success, it came, whispering, "Was it a fluke? Can you do it again?"

As afraid as I was of failing, I was equally afraid I'd slip up and show my flaws to the new people I met along the way. How could they miss them? They seemed to blaze like neon signs to me. I worked to hide them, or just hide me altogether, but that wasn't possible for my daddy's daughter. I could never be invisible and I could never be secure enough to fit in.

Why were people always telling me to "Just be yourself"? That was a ridiculous piece of advice as far as I was concerned. I didn't know who I was when other people were around, or how to control the personality that made my teenage years a nightmare and followed me into adulthood. And I certainly didn't think "myself" was something I'd even want to be — an insecure girl who talked too much and tried too hard to impress.

If someone had told me the big fat personality I hated so much would be an advantage someday, or that my fate was to be in a business totally dependent on developing relationships with other people, I wouldn't have believed it. But that's where I would end up — in a job where I had to approach strangers, win their time and their trust, listen to them, understand them, and counsel them. It was the career I'd spent my childhood training for.

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Excerpted from How to Build a Piano Bench by Ruthi Postow Birch. Copyright © 2017 Ruthi Postow Birch. Excerpted by permission of River Grove Books.
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