Eight-year-old Hannah is counting loud and clear at the piano in our living room. She is sitting with Shinichi, her piano teacher, a reserved yet talkative man, who, Hannah has told me, says that he has two rules that she must obey for playing piano: 1. You must count when you play; 2. Don't look at your hands.
When Hannah's three older siblings hear Hannah, they look at me, and we share a smile, a little giggle, at how sweet, how carina, how cute her counting is. Two of the kids have taken piano, and we have never heard them count, and certainly not count like this, with a loud clear confident voice. I don't want Hannah to get self-conscious and not count, so I tell them, "Shhhhh, she is doing so well! Don't laugh or tease her about it." They comply, delighted to be part of this, I think, in the same way that they go along with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for her.
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When I'm on Christmas vacation, I decide that I will try to learn piano again, for the second or third time in my life. The first time I was in sixth grade, and those lessons lasted for three years. I had that big red book, John Thompson's Modern Book for the Piano (okay, I'm not sure that it said Modern then, but when I google this book now, I see that this is the title now), and from 1984-1986, this series was my learning. I plopped it up on the piano to practice whichever songs Mr. Hashim assigned me for the week. I know I practiced because it was homework, and I completed homework; I couldn't imagine another option. I likely practiced exactly what was assigned, made it good enough, and called it done (much like science homework for me through elementary, middle, high school, and college). I remember practicing my scales and having a hard time keeping my fingers from not all flying up off the keys, as I tried to press down just one at a time. While I pressed my index finger down, the middle finger, the ring finger, and the pinkie immediately reacted by going in the opposite direction: up.
I walked up two flights of stairs in a stairwell to get to Mr. Hashim's office, what I guess we'd call now a studio. I pictured him -- even then -- as smoking a cigar while I played, but even then I wasn't sure whether I was making that up. My mom complained that we had to pay if we cancelled, but when he cancelled -- which he did when he was called to play the organ at the Bruins' games at the Boston Garden -- there was no penalty for him or bonus for us.
On weekday mornings, I got up early and sat at the kitchen table while my mom made breakfast for my dad and he ate. After he left at 6:30am, I ate Toaster Strudel, drizzling the frosting in squiggles, or a bowl of Cocoa Krispies or Captain Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch, or, if I was feeling like being healthy, Corn Flakes with a spoon of sugar. I sat and watched her clean up the kitchen or do chores, and I played Wingo and other games in The Boston Herald that morning.
One day she said to me, "You sit here every morning. You have plenty of time. You should be practicing piano."
I'd never considered that. She hadn't made me take piano as she had the two oldest kids (I was number four of five kids); I asked to take lessons. I wanted to learn. I wanted to be able to move my hands along those keys and make sounds, make songs. My oldest sister could play "Jingle Bells" and "Joy to the World", and even Debby Boone. ("You light up my life...you bring me whole...to carry on..." My mom used to tell me that I asked my kindergarten teacher, Miss Campbell to learn "You Light Up My Life" on the guitar, and I would teach the kids all the words. And indeed, guitar-playing Miss Campbell, amidst the play that used to be kindergarten in the 1970s, used our circle music time to do just that that winter right as the blizzard of '78 hit.) So I wanted to learn the piano, and I wanted to get better and be really good. I just hadn't thought about practicing beyond my mandated homework. Maybe I practiced more then, I don't really remember. My younger brother picked out a short -- two lines -- song he liked from that red book, and I used to play that one a lot. I still wonder which one it was. If I got the John Thompson red books again -- perhaps books 1 and 2? -- I would know it when I played it. I got to playing Christmas carols, too, eventually. So I was fine, not great, but good enough.
When high school started, my mom said, "Choose one: soccer or piano. You don't have time to do both."
She knew that I'd choose soccer: I'd been playing since I was five, I was trying out for the high school team, and not playing was never a consideration. It was just what my sister Christine and I did every fall, every spring, and sometimes every winter and summer, too.
That was the end of Mr. Hashim, his possibly imagined cigar and smoke, and piano for me.
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Nine years later I was teaching and living at a private school. I was an intern, teaching just two classes, at a day school with twenty boarders. In the evenings, I could do whatever I wanted. I decided that I wanted to try piano again. I took my school keys, went down to the music building a couple evenings a week, and sat at the piano, starting over with my book, song by song, page by page.
I don't know for how many months I did this. Likely I stopped when I started dating a boy and having plans more nights of the week.
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I married a guy who plays the piano. I cannot even understand the papers he puts up to play on the piano. Not having a piano is painful for him. When we first bought a condo, we got a used piano (possibly for free, because most people will be happy for you to take their pianos because they don't want to pay to get rid of their piano -- moving a piano can easily cost $1000), paid to move it and get it via crane up to our second floor condo. When his grandmother's piano became available, we got rid of our piano, paid to ship out his grandmother's piano from New Mexico, and again paid to have a crane hoist the New Mexico piano up to our condo. And when we moved to our own house, the crane and movers came again, the piano hanging in the air, in the sky, high up, wonderfully unreal.
His mom teaches piano, too. And when she plays the piano in our living room, the sound is richer than I've ever heard in our house, a deep, resonant, full sound that stops me. Daniel's playing is beautiful, yes, but likely I've just gotten used to it. And yet. Years ago, when I knocked on the door of his grandmother's house, to see a girlfriend who was living there, I could hear a piano back then, and then, too, years ago, I was awed, enjoying the sound before I knocked, before he came to the door, before I saw him and fell almost immediately in love with him. And when I commented on his playing, asking what it was, he said something self-deprecating like, "Oh, I always play the same song, the same notes, just something I like."
So we have a piano.
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In December I start on page one of Hannah's book, this time not the John Thompson, but the Alfred Basic Piano Library Course, Part 1. I know my G clef scale for the right hand pretty well: empty garbage before dad flips or every good boy deserves fudge for the lines on the scale: E G B D F. And dface for the spaces between the lines: D F A C E. The bass clef scale has always been harder for me to remember, so I'll have to relearn that. But for now my goal over December break is to catch up with our eight-year-old. Her teacher Shinichi has marked in pencil which songs she has done ("v. good" they say) and which ones she is working on ("practice"). Often Hannah sits with me, teaching me as Shinichi has taught her, insisting on my out loud and not looking down at my hands.
Once school starts up again, I have a hard time keeping up with Hannah's weekly progress -- grading and prepping and email and daily house and kid upkeep don't take me back to the piano bench much. But then COVID-19 arrives and spring break and extended quarantine, and there I am, back at the piano, practicing Hannah's songs by myself on the bench.
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The kids aren't home. My husband is in the basement on his computer. I sit at the piano, cautious, not wanting to make mistakes. Usually I practice with Hannah, but today I'm on my own. I hit the keys in the right order, in the wrong order, in an order I make up. I don't like making mistakes, hitting the wrong keys -- it doesn't sound good, and I think, How annoying to hear this. I play quietly, not wanting to draw attention to myself or bother others with my errors.
I'm by myself in the living room. Mistakes don't matter. I am not going to bother anyone. I realize, I don't know why, that I can hit these keys as hard as I want. I don't mean that I am going to abuse the piano and make noise banging away. But when I hit a key with my finger, I can push it down hard, loud, confidently. I can enjoy the feeling and the sound, whether it's right or wrong. I can make mistakes big if I feel like it, and it doesn't matter.
I play loud now. Hitting slow and loud the keys that make up the songs in Hannah's Alfred Basic Piano Library Course, Part 2. I've made progress. I love the slow and loud. I love not being apologetic for mistakes. I love not making myself small even if I am the worst piano player in the house, even if I grew up in a culture that disdained people's drawing attention to themselves, even if my loudness could be construed as showing off. Showing off what, I think -- my learning piano? hitting keys loud, both correct ones and incorrect ones? I am going to play Hannah's songs and Mary's "Amazing Grace" and Sebastian's "Sonatina," too. Loud and right and loud and wrong. I am just going to play play play. And I am going to be loud loud loud.
I play and play, and my husband comes upstairs and compliments my playing. A kindness on his part. "I didn't know it was you! I thought you were one of the kids playing," he says. "You sound good."
This is high praise for me: I am trying to catch those kids.
I get quiet again with him there. I'm ready for him to go so I can play loud and confident again. But he's never asked me to play quiet. My errors don't bother him, and he's a musician, so he's not worried about my bringing attention to myself with my playing.
It's me: it's me who has somehow understood somewhere somehow that I should be quiet. When I was a kid sitting on the front porch, my parents gently chided me, "Careful: your voice carries. I could hear it when I was walking down the street."
I don't fault them: they were right, and I certainly didn't need the neighborhood to hear me. But it wasn't just the front porch voice carrying that shushed me. Somewhere I learned not to disagree loudly, not to contradict, not to speak up. I did learn how to keep people comfortable, how to make peace, how to avoid topics that made other people angry. At work, in my marriage, in my family of origin.
I don't feeling like I'm finding my voice now, but I do feel like I'm uncovering it. I want to speak words the way I hit the keys that afternoon, slow and clear and confident and not worried about making mistakes.
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