Only in America

Ohio is being carved, our earth is being removed, peeled back, as if to excavate the darkest secrets of our souls.

We are singing the old hymns on Sundays, the hymns with the beautiful names: “Softly and Tenderly,” “Let The Lower Lights Be Burning,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” As a young boy, I notice a recurring theme in these old hymns: Someday the world will be reborn with the sound of a trumpet. The sound of a trumpet.

Now all these years later I listen to the great American horn players we’ve all heard: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to name a few. Even now I wonder about the sound of that trumpet. Is it real? Is it a metaphor? If, at the crack of dawn, we did wake one morning to someone blowing riffs in the sky, what would it sound like? What exactly is on God’s iPod?

The trumpet child will blow his horn
Will blast the sky till it’s reborn
With Gabriel’s power and Satchmo’s grace
He will surprise the human race
The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonius notes from up above...

But the sound of these horns feels far away, like they’re announcing something, an event, the start of a new chapter. We want to move in closer, lean in together, improvise a little slow dance. So let’s move from the horns to the sound of the piano. Let’s find an old piano with a broken heart, like the upright piano we had at church, a piano full of prayers spoken and unspoken, a piano that makes the old hymns sound like they’re being played next door to a saloon. Let’s tell the truth. There were two taverns located right across the road from that little white wooden Protestant church where my father was minister. And as Karin likes to say—after what we grew up seeing in church, having a stiff drink nearby is the sort of convenience that makes America great. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first time I heard a piano. I can still see it. My mother has taken me to visit one of her friends who has adopted a boy a few years older than me. We walk into the living room, and there he is seated like God himself on a bench in front of a small wooden house with elephant-ivory keys, and pedals like a car. And that sound, the sound of a piano, that loud, infinitely happy/sad sound, that universe being born as he touches the black and white—I can’t believe my ears. I haven’t been walking all that long, but I walk as quickly as I can with unpredictable knees over to the corner of the bench and steady myself, and get the palm of my right hand up on the keyboard to slap the miracle and help it come out. The adopted boy glares at me and gives me a push. I find my seat on the living room floor. I joke now that I learned at a very early age that music was a cutthroat business: He was up, and I was down—and he wanted to keep it that way.

My mother grew up on an Amish farm with no electricity. She dreamed of owning a piano. Her second-grade teacher helped her cut out a cardboard keyboard and carefully draw the black and white keys. My mother, as a girl, would sit in her bedroom, one of 12 children, and play her cardboard keyboard, and hear the music that was only inside of her.

We can't make The Trumpet Child without the sound of the piano.

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My father, who grew up in an Amish community that prohibited all instruments—except, for whatever reason, the harmonica—eventually moved away after deciding he wasn’t cut out to be a farmer. He brought home a stereo Sylvania record player and began buying records. He didn’t know quite where to begin, but he ended up choosing Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, Mahalia Jackson and some early Eddy Arnold. My father didn’t know that playing Beethoven, Mahalia and Eddy all in the same evening was against the rules. It was all just music to him, all part of a journey of discovery. And my father eventually found the sound of the clarinet and brought home Mozart’s woodwind concerti—anything he could get his hands on that featured the clarinet.

Years later, I thought of my father when I was on tour with Over the Rhine in New Orleans, watching a procession of musicians led by a clarinet player, dancing their slow funeral march down the street, celebrating the end of the funeral, giving an old friend a proper goodbye. I know my father would’ve had tears of joy in his eyes.

We need the sound of that New Orleans clarinet on this record. Let’s get caught up in something, some kind of celebration in spite of the darkness inside and out. Let’s join in, raise a glass to this story we’re writing. We lose the plot at times, but it’s our story, the only one we get to write our names on.

And so it always begins with family. The people that raise us up, haunted by their own childhoods. I try to connect the dots, sketch a few faces. I feel around like a blind piano player for bits of foreshadowing.

My father bought a piano when I was in the third grade, not a cardboard keyboard, a real piano of our very own. The old upright piano arrives, a wooden beast carried by, a real piano of our very own. The old upright piano arrives, a wooden beast carried by my father and three neighbors, and this is where I go as a child to begin tentatively saying what I don’t have words for. I place my left hand on what I later learn is an E flat, and I begin to let the music that is inside of me find its way out.

So we move from the horns to the sound of the piano. But something vital is missing that I can’t quite put my finger on.

My father grows skeptical of the public-school system in America and finds a boarding school in Western Canada that’s worthy of his children. We have an auction and sell almost everything we own including our Ohio piano, and head west to Montana in a Buick LeSabre pulling a trailer. Eventually we end up in the Bitterroot Valley, south of Missoula. We buy a Montana piano. We Detweiler boys learn to fish for trout in the Bitterroot River: the cold and slippery rainbows; the moody, determined cutthroat; the suspicious brownies, all bicep and brain; the lightning-fast brookies; the toothy Dolly Vardens.

I head to the Canadian boarding school when I’m 13, and on a clear day we can look across an ocean of wind-blown wheat and see the mountains a hundred miles away. I finally have my first real piano teacher, a serious, lean man who lifts my arm and lets it fall toward the keyboard. I catch it before it hits, but he tells me to let it fall into the keys. I do, and the piano booms. Use the weight of the arm, he says, Relax. Listen to the tone. Connect the notes. If I use the weight of my arm, I can play loud. He wants a full, rich tone, and he smiles when I get it right.

My piano books are from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, a Canadian city far away. After my first year of lessons, the Royal Conservatory sends a grand lady to Three Hills, Alberta, to listen to each of us play privately, and the grand lady will make comments and give us a score. I play my first piece.