Spirituality Column #806

April 26, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sparky’s Magic Piano

By Bob Walters

One of my earliest memories – a vivid, before-kindergarten recollection – is of a record album my dad bought for us kids titled “Sparky’s Magic Piano.”

We’re talking circa 1958, when a “record” was one of those flat vinyl discs you put on a “record player.”  Dad – John Walters, 1926-1991 – was a classical music buff and I vividly remember as a little kid when he and mom brought home our new “Hi-Fi” – a “Pilot” brand, tube-based, monaural (not stereo) furniture-grade, dark, square-ish, top-opening floor unit.  It had a matching second speaker Dad placed on the other side of our small living room at 321 Lincoln Blvd., in the Lakeview suburb of Battle Creek, Mich.

Dad had shopped around and was convinced this Pilot was the richest, best sounding home Hi-Fi unit available.  It wasn’t the stereo-TV-radio combo many baby-boomers grew up with. It was just a record player, but a truly magnificent sounding one.

Along with the predictable Bach-Beethoven-Brahms-Mozart-Tchaikovsky recordings that started his soon-to-be-substantial collection, Dad brought home for us kids – just my older sister Linda and I at the time; Joe was a baby and Debbie came along a bit later – a story-and-music boxed album set of “Sparky’s Magic Piano.”

One way you knew, from a practical standpoint, that it was for the kids – the title notwithstanding – was that the three-record set was numbered with Sides 1 and 6 on the first record, then 2 and 5, then 3 and 4.  You could stack them on the changer, listen to Sides 1 through 3, then flip the whole stack and listen to Sides 4 through 6.

On Dad’s multi-platter concert albums, Sides 1 and 2 were on the same disc so you couldn’t stack them on the changer and possibly scratch them when they dropped.

That record player remained part of my life up into my adulthood, but let’s talk about Sparky.  He was a mythical boy with desire but little talent who wanted very much to play great piano.  Alas, Sparky made a deal with the devil, trading his own soul for the talent to be a world-famous concert pianist prodigy.  On Side 6, the devil wants his talent back and leaves Sparky on stage devastated and humiliated, unable to play.

Moral to the story:  You have to work for and earn lasting success and joy.

Satan’s funny that way.  The human condition is rife with desires to be really good at something for the sake of fame and money, rather than the purer and Godly route of putting in the work and love required to bring true joy to one’s endeavors.

Satan always wants his gifts back, because they are worldly, fleeting, and based in pride, greed, and power.  He has no power to create life; death is his only payout.

Beethoven was great at music because he loved it.  Larry Bird loved basketball.  Billy Graham loved Jesus and loved leading people to Christ.  The happiest people I know – probably who any of us know – are the ones whose families, lives, vocations, professions, and hobbies have been shaped by something larger than pedantic earthly measurements of time, sweat, and desire. Like, say, love, service, faith, and God’s gifts.

In this post-Easter period of joy and reflection, one lesson from the Cross of Jesus is that nothing truly worthwhile comes cheaply or easily.  Another is that love and sacrifice, not fame or money, are the life sparks that burn hottest, brightest, and longest.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), whose dad sang tenor in Michigan State’s a cappella men’s choir in the 1940s, figures surely others know of Sparky’s Magic Piano.