I wonder now, with age and some knowledge of how to encourage children, whether I might have coaxed something resembling music out of those piano keys if Mrs. Kaufman had smiled at me from time to time or had dispensed with her wooden stick.[13] If I had switched to something relevant instead of playing “The Happy Farmer” ad nauseam[14], maybe I might have shown some progress.
There were other teachers as our family moved from place to place for my father’s work. For one bright and shining year, my sister and I took joint lessons from a young woman who lived in a sun-filled apartment with her husband and, wonder of wonders, their cherubic baby.[15] We raced to get there, to see the baby, to bask[16] in the teacher’s encouragement, to learn lilting new tunes as we sat side by side happily. She held a recital[17]. Our mom made us matching taffeta[18] dresses. We drank fizzy drinks[19] and won small prizes.
And then, too soon, a new town and a new piano teacher in another stuffy room where joy and fun were as locked away as if they’d been encased inside a Victorian bell jar.[20] Another two years of torturous lessons, another two years of giggling once we got out the door, wondering where on earth her handkerchief had ended up once she cast it into the depths of her gargantuan bosom.[21]
And then, when my own three children were tiny, fate brought me the most wonderful of European-trained teachers. Anna promised that one day, if I worked hard, she would let me migrate from the upright in her den to the baby grand in her sitting room.[22] For the first time in my life of lessons I felt the music filling me up, like an unborn baby, ready to leap and grow. It wasn’t to be. Anna met a sad death crossing the busy street near her home, a sudden ending at the end of a very long life.
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