"Would you like to take piano lessons?" my mom asked me one day.
It was summertime, and I was five. Of course I wanted to take piano lessons! Five year olds want to do everything.
I had just finished a round of ballet, tap and tumbling lessons with Ms. Arlene Higbee at the community center. I wasn't a natural at any of them, tap being
especially confusing what with all that clicking and whatnot. (Side Note: this trend has continued to this very day, and you can see an example of my dancing prowess here. I was Elaine's body double for
this scene.)
(Okay, I wasn't really Elaine's body double, but I do believe they found the inspiration for that clip by spying on me at youth dances when I was a teen.) Anyway, in ballet I was constantly forgetting to "tuck my po po in" as Ms. Higbee called it, though that wasn't even close to my biggest problem.
Maybe piano would be my thing!We hadn't had our piano for long. I can hardly begin to convey the excitement we felt the day it arrived at our house. Years before, Dad had made a deal that if mom had dinner on the table before our fake coo-coo clock bonged at 6:00 pm, he would pay her a dollar, which he always stuffed down he shirt for some reason. We had no idea this wasn't how every couple operated.
Every night, we'd scurry around setting the table and putting the food on, (and if you were tasked with putting the silverware on, you gave yourself a complete set of "the good pattern"...the one with little flowers on the handles. And you made sure to lick it so your pesky siblings wouldn't be tempted to switch it.)
With hardly a moment to spare we'd finish and then throw ourselves onto our seats, all so daddy could come in with his reward money and stuff it down mom's shirt. She saved all those dollar bills until she had enough to buy our baby grand, and we celebrated its arrival with the prettiest grand piano shaped cake you can imagine....a gift from a neighbor. It was almost too beautiful to eat, but we did anyway because Rule # 1 in my family was you NEVER EVER EVER passed up a chance to ingest sugar. (Side Note: I make lots of cakes, but I have never yet come close to making one as beautiful as that white grand piano cake was...at least in my mind. It's seriously a magical memory for me.)
Back to my mom's question.
"Piano lessons would be so fun!" I exclaimed, excited at the prospect of a new activity and the chance to play mom's new toy which we'd been routinely shooed away from.
She explained that she would sign up me and Mike, who was fifteen months older than me, for lessons with the lady who played the piano at church. "You'll go to her house once a week, but you'll practice every day at home".
I readily agreed, and we got started.
Mrs. Feldon was a sweet lady. Soft spoken and gentle, she could play well enough. Each week when Mike's lesson was over, it was my turn to sit down on the bench. Mrs. Feldon would open my music book up, play through a song for me, and then ask me to try it.
I had watched closely to see where she put her hands, and would listen carefully while she played the song. Then I would put my hands on the same starting keys, and try to figure out what notes to play next. Using this method, I was able to replicate the song well enough to pass it off and earn a sticker to paste on the page.
Mrs. Feldon and my mom were convinced that I was making good progress, but the truth is, I had no clue about those odd little dots on the page. They were about as meaningful as drops of water on the bathtub wall to me.
My lessons progressed in this manner for a couple months, but I was quickly growing restless with them. It was hard to sit still, I didn't understand anything about the printed music, and besides, there was an in-ground swimming pool in the Feldon's back yard.
I could hardly think about anything else during my lesson. Swimming pools were seriously about the most exciting thing I could imagine at that age, and I dreamed about being allowed to go in it. It was especially hard when the Feldon kids were swimming while I was there.
Maybe if I can just keep up the lessons long enough, they'll invite me to join them! I pined away for the chance to swim in a real pool.
My mom had decided that I should practice for thirty minutes a day. That was an eternally long time for a kid like me but I tried. I made decent progress initially, and pretty soon had moved beyond The Boatman all the way up to the Irish Jig song my teacher had assigned me for my recital piece. As far as I was concerned, Irish Jig was one of the most complex songs ever written, and I was really proud of myself.
It is a sad truth that for most kids starting something new, within a few months the novelty wears off, and I was no exception. We'd already had our recital, complete with refreshments, and from my perspective, having master the Irish Jig, there wasn't really anything left to look forward to. Even the swimming pool was closed for the season.
"I'm done taking piano lessons" I announced to mom one day.
"Oh no you're not" she informed me. "You have to take it for at least a year before you can quit."
A YEAR?! That tidbit hadn't been mentioned when I'd agreed to the lessons. Had I really missed that clause when I'd signed up for this gig? A year of anything when you're five is like a life-sentence. I wasn't even in kindergarten yet. I couldn't even imagine that much time.
"But I don't want to any more" I explained.
"You'll be glad you did" she assured me, as she sat me down on the bench to practice. Perhaps she thought there was virtuosity in me or something, and that if she could just get me to hang in there, I would become magnificent.
One day as my lesson came to an end, Mrs. Feldon assigned me a song for the week that she hadn't played through yet.
"Can you play it for me?" I asked her.
"We're out of time for today" she said. "Just follow the notes."
But I didn't know how to "just follow the notes". I'd been faking my way through lessons for a few months by then, and could only eek out tunes I'd actually heard. This became a problem the next day after lunch, when mom told me it was time to practice.
"I don't want to practice today" I announced.
"You have to get your practicing in every day," she explained to me.
"I want to quit taking piano".
"I already told you that you have to stick it out for a year."
"That's too long. I don't like it!" I whined.
"You're going to sit on that piano bench until you've put in your thirty minutes today," she informed me.
I'll just sit here then, I thought, full of five-year old defiance.
It became a horrible power struggle between us. It was the first time in my life that I openly defied my parent's wishes, and she tried her best to stand her ground, believing it was in my best interest to do so. In the end, neither of us was a winner, because every half hour for the next six hours, mom would come in the living room with "The Brush".
The Brush was a fish-shaped wooden bristle brush with a glass fish eye on it. She and dad had bought on their honeymoon in Canada, and it had become her tool of choice for spanking us. Dad preferred his hand. Sibling lore is that they actually bought it specifically to use in disciplining their future children, but I'm not sure if this tale is strictly true or not, because who is thinking about spanking unborn children on their honeymoon?!
"Get up," she ordered me, but I'd seen The Brush in her hand, and wasn't one to willingly give in to spankings. I sat there crying and feeling desperate.
Mom yanked me up with one hand, and with a swift movement laid a few strokes of The Brush on my back side. Then, while I howled in pain, she threatened to do it again in another thirty minutes if I didn't start practicing.
After six hours of crying mutely at the piano interspersed every 30 minutes with a round of spankings via The Brush, she finally relented and let me get off the bench.
"You can go to your room for the night" she told me. It was not our finest hour.
It wasn't long after this incident that I quit taking lessons. It became an epic struggle between us, and even though it had only been a few months, mom had four kids at that point, and frankly, there wasn't enough energy in the world to fight me over the piano every day. I'm a pretty strong-willed horse. I think the only time she got her way over my preferences was when it came to having a line at our wedding reception...which I vehemently did not want. But that's another tale for another blog post.
It's really unfortunate that no one ever noticed I was playing by ear, because a I think a different approach would have resulted in a vastly different outcome for me. But I didn't know my ability was in any way unique…I thought that's how everyone did it. (Side Note: With my own daughter, I've taken a different approach. My #1 priority was to find a teacher that inspires her who could actually teach. While it hasn't been cream and chocolate all the time, she passed my paltry technical abilities up after about 4 months of lessons, and has really blossomed in musical ability this past year.)
As soon as I stopped lessons, I kept a wide berth around that big ole' piano in our livingroom. In fact, I didn't lay a finger on any piano for the next decade, but when I finally did, I could play every song I'd ever learned without skipping a beat. Even the Irish Jig.
