Tribute to a music lover, baker and a loving mom
Tribute to a music lover, baker and a loving mom
If you learned to play Beethoven’s Fur Elise on the piano in the Finleyville area at any time between 1967 and 2010, there’s a very good chance Mrs. Dolinar was sitting next to you at the piano, counting out the beat.
My mom, Dorothy, passed away peacefully at home this week after a brief illness. In her 89 years, she taught hundreds of students to master the keyboard, starting with that little song about a woodchuck, and then often guiding students to proficiency. Weeknights brought a parade of kids to our home; they’d do homework in the family room while waiting their turn for a lesson.
The sounds that came from the little piano room across the hall were so baked into the air that we didn’t really notice; they were as much part of our home as the dogs that wandered around, or the sound of my dad mowing the lawn, or the smells of good things baking in the oven.
It would be impossible to capture my mom in these 600 words, and I won’t try. My friend Gina and I were talking about obituaries and how so many of them, in describing a loved one, will say they “lit up the room when they walked in.”
“Promise you will not say that when I die,” I told her, reminding her that wouldn’t be true about me, anyway. “Instead, be specific and give details.”
And so here goes. My mom loved to bake. A few days before every birthday, she took requests: What kind of cake would you like? For my kids and me, it was the moist coconut cake. And then there were the banana and zucchini breads, delicious little loaves she baked by the dozens. I cannot remember a visit that did not end with her placing four of the plastic-wrapped loaves into a bag for me to take home. As a single person living alone, it was hard to keep up. I filled my freezer, and still they came.
She knew I liked marshmallow peeps, but only if they were good and stale. Mom perused the aisles of dollar stores in the weeks after Easter, buying up what was left, and then letting them go hard and chewy on her counters to add to my bag of banana bread. Peep Jerky!
Although mom always baked, I think she turned to it more after retiring from teaching piano. Her last student was a young man living a thousand miles away; they did a few lessons over Zoom. She knew that music is an important thing – maybe one of the most important things – and she spent so much of her life helping people learn to play. Toward the end of her teaching, she had a few students she charged only for the “bad” lessons. If they’d practiced, it was free.
She had her favorite stories, including this one that she liked to tell. When my daughter was just a few days old, my mom came to help me so I could get some rest. One morning, my son, who was 4, bounded down the stairs to find her holding the baby.
“Grammy, you look almost pretty this morning!”
Mom was not almost pretty, she was completely pretty – and generous and very intelligent. She loved us three and her grandkids and great-grandkids, and our dad. They were married 68 years. All along, she wanted to be helpful, in whatever way that meant.
Driving in the city for work, I’d sometimes be stopped in traffic near an unhoused person asking for money or food. I’d hand one of Mom’s banana breads out the window. I think she would like to know she’d done that little thing to help.
And I like to think that because of her, every Christmas somebody somewhere sits down at the piano and plays Jingle Bells for a family sing-along.
And maybe even some Beethoven. I think she’d like that.