Cecily vs. the Piano

My Dear Reader,

I suppose that piano lessons might be a normal right-of-passage in middle-class American families, and supposedly when you're Mormon that goes double. My Padre just so happens to be an excellent pianist, and I suppose that Madre intended for me to follow in his footsteps. I also have this secret suspicion that she wanted all of her children to be as accomplished as the heroines in the Jane Austen-ey novels that she loves so much. Either way, we had a piano, and a piano teacher lived barely a block away, so little Cecily went off to piano lessons once a week, just like she was told. And she hated every minute of it.

Okay, so maybe not every minute. Playing the piano is a very enjoyable thing, and it comes in very useful now and again. Practicing isn't even that bad. I suppose that it was the process of being taught the piano that I hated. I mean, every week, I was given a task to do, and then the next week, I was judged on how well I had accomplished the task, and depending on how well I did, I was told to perfect that task or was given a new one, at which point the cycle would start over again. And it was a fairly vicious cycle, as any kid who's been on the same lesson for a month would know. I didn't take kindly to being constantly judged and evaluated by some piano justice every week, and it really started to effect my self-esteem at this point. In a way, I really related to Bart Collins of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., which you should go out and rent right now if you haven't seen it already. In any case, each week turned into a battle, and those battles turned our student-teacher relationship into a war. The piano was the battlefield: if I completed my lesson, I had won. If not, the victory was hers. It may seem unfair that my teacher, who had such an invested interest in winning, should be the judge, but part of being a child is accepting the fact that you have no control in your own life.

My piano teacher was nice enough, I suppose, but besides the fact that she passed judgement on me once every seven days, I was bothered by her habit of eating and painting her nails during my lessons. I probably shouldn't have been, considering that she was a divorcée who brought home her bacon by spending her entire day with snot-nosed, ungrateful children, but I was. I mean, the way I saw it, I could have been doing a lot of other stuff right then instead of sitting on her bench and plunking out keys, and I would have rather been doing just about anything. But there I was, sacrificing my time to become a proficient, only to hear her munching in my ear the entire time. So I decided that I wasn't going to let her get away with it, and one day, I came to my piano lesson with a sucker. If that worked, I was was going to figure out how to come in the next week with some lasagna. It was an ingenious plan. But when I showed up with that sucker, the teacher looked down at me with frowning eyes, patiently requesting that I put my sucker on a plate until it was time for me to go home. It was then that I realized that I had overlooked one crucial factor of the Cecily-Piano Teacher War: I could only win if I stopped being eight. Since that was a sacrifice that I was not willing and physically unable to make, I decided to retreat.

Even after I realized that I was caught in a hopeless struggle, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it except for whine and complain, which I did at every opportunity. Beyond that, I could only try to make my hours trapped at the piano as enjoyable as possible. So when it was time to practice at home, I would spend a deceptive amount of time doing actual practice, and when Madre would have to run off after a brother or two, I would do the one thing that I was truly accomplished at: dawdling. At rare occasions, this would involve carving names into the piano. Now, any dumb kid could carve his or her name into any dumb piano, but I was much smarted than that. You see, when your name was into the piano, it was easy for Madre to tell whose fault it was. So I, through a stroke of genius, would carve someone else's name. It was as if I could choose which party too the blame, and I carefully chose with three letters: DAD. After all, Padre hardly ever got in trouble, and anyone could see that it was his turn. Besides, I really wanted to see what happened if Padre got grounded. Of course, it turned out that Padre was too smart to carve anybody's name into anything, and I got into trouble anyway. I swear, my Madre is the best detective I know.

Anyway, after all of that constant battling between teachers and pianos, I guess you might think that I never learned anything, but I ended up being okay. I didn't go to Julliard or anything, but I learned how to read music, and I built a foundation for music appreciation that I'm still building upon today, despite my best efforts at dawdling and complaining. Now, I'm horribly out of practice, but I could bounce back to mediocrity. You just watch me.

Regards, best wishes, and lasagna,

-Cecily Jane