Piano Bench Blues

Arabesque, Solfegettio, Untitled

I can play Three Blind Mice with one hand or the other, but co-ordinating them and getting the timing and notes right is almost a mystery to me. I can play, but only what comes from my head through my fingers. How this exasperates me, me one of those kids who wanted to play the piano, to take lessons when I was nine. So here I am again among the young but old.

Arabesque

 

Solfegettio

 

Untitled

 

I sat on D.’s piano bench and stewed, heard my voice utter how awful I felt, that my right hand and left wouldn’t co-ordinate so that I could even poorly play a simple version of the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice. As slowly as I might, her presence and my despair, my age-old diminishing of my talent when the least obstacle appears, they didn’t combine to  integrate my hands. Once or twice I thought I heard the piece as it should be played, but this triumph was lost in humiliation. I tried to explain my exasperation in terms of my athletic ability, that I’d played sport up to and including professional football, and that getting my hands to work together to play a simple melody should be easy. It vexed me to say the least, and I’m sure I troubled her with my annoyance.

I did have the urge, a strong wave of it, to get up from the bench, put on my coat and leave, take my books and depart with apology and contrition that I should have bothered her with my aspirations, all of which were built on a few charming melodies that filtered through my fingers years ago. And now I thought I might retrieve them and capture others before I died.

And that’s another thing. This pain in my neck lately has been getting worse, has become more apparent, more intense, but which as in the past comes and goes. Even though its coming and going were more pronounced, to use this as an excuse would be too much even for an excuse-ladened lad like me.

Yet when I got home I wanted to try the Mice’s Pieces again. I couldn’t wait it seemed, so again I sat at the piano for forty minutes and tried and tried to get it right, and it did start to enter and leave my fingers more easily. This happened several times from then on into the night, as late as eight o’ clock after I returned from getting something to eat, which I didn’t find. I had to try it again, and other assignments I’d taken on. I was getting excited and I suspected that my teacher had instilled this somehow with her appreciation of my difficulty, and her deep interest in my success. She often repeated why she took me as a student, that I had been her teacher once.

Such a pat on the back from such a talented woman. Who wouldn’t want to try with such encouragement? And I did, and I would, as this my early resurrection down my lenten road began. My dizzy squirming and complaint seemed so needless, although I’d known of this, that dedication and perseverance were all I required.To muster them was the deed of my desire.

I knew this long before I winced and winced again sitting on that bench wondering why my aging hands wouldn’t co-operate and let me hum of mice, see them running and who wouldn’t from an animated knife. I was elated when I said goodbye until next time, even if there were only one, to pick up the metronome D. was getting me to regulate the beat among my hands.

What she did for me that day will hold me up and buoy me forth through more complicated rhymes than The Mices Three. As I drove away I thought of my seminar Friday in Writercraft, 2008, and the clustering we did with “childhood”. I thought of the sadness I saw and felt the first day of school, and wondered that I could capture it as thoroughly as I did, and I wondered that some of those students had realized something of this sadness too.

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