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My family tree is not a particularly musical one. On my mother's entire side of the family dating back to 1900, there are only two people that learned to play the piano. One was my mother's aunt, and the other was when I started taking lessons nearly half a century later. Coincidentally, we both began playing at the age of five, forging an unspoken bond between my great aunt and I that my Grandmother still reminds me of today; a bond that kept me playing, a bond that will always keep me playing. I don't remember much about my aunt, and what I do remember is generally limited to images and specific sensations. Perhaps the image most intertwined with my aunt, the image most representative of her spirit, was the baby grand piano in her apartment.

When I asked my Grandmother to describe her sister to me using only one word, I was surprised to see her face overtaken by a grin. Not the sort of polite smile you'd expect from someone reminiscing over the deceased, but a grin that seemed to say, "Michael, if you only knew what I knew."
I was expecting to hear the word "hopeless," or maybe the embittered utterance of "broke" or "irresponsible." Instead she threw me a curveball, answering in a far less judgmental way then I had expected. Though my Grandmother rarely had anything nice to say about my Aunt Dorothy, she gave her the courtesy of a backhanded compliment. "If your Great Aunt was anything," she told me, "she was musical."
My Aunt's story begins on April 14th, 1942. Born a month earlier than expected, Dorothy Marie Jurzyk's weighed only five and a half pounds and was given a slim to none chance of survival. Never one to pay notice to stacked odds, she defied the doctor's prognosis and her mother and father brought her home to six older sisters, all crammed tight into a modest three bedroom, two bathroom ranch house. Her father's love for classical music sparked her interest in the piano at the unusually young age of five. The Jurzyk's youngest daughter became the first in the family to exhibit an affinity for music, an affinity that would define and guide her for the rest of her life.
In her elementary years Dorothy would go with her father to a bar her uncle owned to showcase her skills. Patrons on Thursday and Friday night were in for quite a treat, for what better way to forget that your son had died at war, or that tax hikes from the war deficit were running you broke than by a night at the bar, listening to a nine year old girl who just-so-happened

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