For the Love
Max and I were doing an online piano lesson.
Thankfully, online piano lessons are rare these days, done only in cases of illness. But still, almost every week has a remote lesson or two. Someone, so it seems, always has a cold.
Online piano lessons are a gift of the pandemic that will stay with us forever, I suspect. Now that all of us—teachers and students—are so well trained about how to move seamlessly to the screen, they are too convenient and indeed too helpful in cases of runny noses and sore throats. While once I dreaded those hours of Zoom lessons, now I know: if I can keep a kid practicing well until they are back in the studio, this is better than missing a week. Viewed this way, FaceTime lessons are almost a blessing.
But back to Max. He was home with a bad cold, and so we were doing a FaceTime lesson that afternoon. After months and months of remote lessons during lockdown, I was familiar with everything I was seeing: the view of the piano and the bookshelves in the background, the dog that every once in a while made an appearance on the screen, even the sounds of the younger brother and mother chattering in the background. I had just prompted Max to play his E-flat major scale—both hands, staccato up, legato down—when he stopped me. “Miss Amy, can you hold on?” and then turning around he said—or rather shouted— “For the love of a peaceful piano practice, will you please be quiet?”
For the love of a peaceful piano practice? I started laughing and couldn’t stop. As Matt once said, these blogs just write themselves.
I try to hang on to unexpected moments of pure joy wherever I can find them these days. I name them, listing them one by one to myself, when the weeks are too long and I’m tired and cranky and can’t remember the last day off I had. Forget life à la 2019, this fall is busyness on steroids, which is potentially more scary than any Halloween ghost or goblin. (Did we not learn anything during lockdown?) Mostly I’m grateful for our full lives, except when that translates to never having an evening free to meet my best friend for a drink or my mother for breakfast. When Matt and I stop long enough to ask ourselves and each other: are we doing OK here? We mostly think we are, but admittedly there is a lot of stealing from Peter to pay Paul like the Monday morning we gave up the trainer (Matt) and the pool (me) for a couple more hours of sleep. I had spent the previous four days in rehearsals for a Santa Fe Symphony concert; Matt had a concert that Friday night with his UNM men’s chorus and extra services on Saturday night at church. In other words, it was not a weekend, friends. So that morning in bed was a fair trade, trust me, but these kinds of negotiations around our time and schedules are constant these days. Even that gets exhausting after a while.
To borrow Max’s sentiment, I long for a peaceful piano practice, and not one that feels infused with the anxiety of the next performance. The fall studio recital is staring us down hard these days and so even my ideals of deep, slow work in students’ lessons get compromised by a foreboding sense of urgency (You have got to get this piece under your fingers, kid! What are we waiting for?). I hate this, and do everything I can to keep breathing, but nevertheless too often an edge, a hurriedness creeps in, despite my best efforts.
Counting breaths helps my inner calm, but even better is counting joy: The kid who comes up with gems like, For the love of a peaceful piano practice. The pots of pansies outside my sunroom door. The 11 pumpkins scattered around my house and courtyard. The handful of really terrific books I have managed to carve out enough time to read the last month. The soup simmering on my stove. The cat that has discovered there is nothing more snuggly than a lap covered with a quilt. The full moon lighting my evening walks. The many mornings that I make it to the pool, and the sweet ones when I don’t.
So much to love.