I am in my fifth year of piano lessons. It isn’t that I’m a slow learner; rather, my piano teacher says I’ve been a musical cripple most of my life. Ever since that nun in charge of the grade school choir told me to only mouth the words and not actually sing. I was in the third grade, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.
I never sang in public again. I listened to music and memorized the score to any song I liked, but I couldn’t comprehend the melody. Did it go up or down? I couldn’t tell, because I’d shut down. And, truthfully, I’d become accustomed to this void in my life. In fact, after a while I didn’t even recognize it. It’s in this way that some accidents — and they are not all of the terrible automobile crash variety — are hard to overcome. We become used to our inadequacies.
About five years ago, something happened. Because I acquired a free piano when we bought our house — the previous owners left it, rather than move it — I began to ponder the possibility of learning to play it. I wanted more than a piece of conversational furniture in our living room. I didn’t know it then, but it was as if I’d been in a wheelchair for ages and thought I might be able to walk.
With that context, my piano teacher’s recent comment doesn’t offend; rather it makes me work harder because I am a musical cripple of my own doing. The little girl in the blue uniform who was chastised might have obeyed the command, but she no longer exists. The woman she is today chooses to stand and walk. And play music.
I’ll never be a great pianist. I’m not sure I’ll ever even be comfortable playing in the presence of others either, but I can tell you the joy of making music and understanding it and feeling it in my fingers and my soul is unimaginable.
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