The Truth

I had been thinking about this for a while, but looking around the room at the kids gathered for Christmas Tea made my previously abstract thoughts tangible. 

The Annual Christmas Tea is a beloved studio ritual. It’s the afternoon when former students who are home for the holidays come together and drink peppermint tea and eat cookies. One pandemic year this took place outside in the courtyard huddled around the chimesa. Many times it becomes a sort of standing cocktail party (sans cocktails) with kids paired up in corners chatting. Last year I picked up a nasty cold and had to cancel the event. But most years, it is one of the sweet traditions in the studio, and a sweet piece of my holidays.

The holidays have been especially sweet this year, full of dear friends and former students, precious rituals and beloved traditions. I mailed 100 Christmas cards, strung twinkling lights on the mantle, filled the fireplace with white candles. We never put up a Christmas tree (No room in the inn. Also, cats.), but the red geraniums in the sunroom windows are in full flower, and the Christmas cacti bloomed right on schedule. I hung fairy lights around the bathroom mirror and the kitchen window and every night they promptly turn on exactly as dusk descends. Nearly every evening after the last student was out the door, I bundled up and went for a walk, taking in the holiday décor and bling of my neighbors (and yes, I might have a few opinions). Of course, there were more cookies than I needed and I could have done without a sugar plum or two, but there were also numerous bowls of soup consumed, and a lot of breathtaking music. The scales balance.  

The Christmas Tea pianists range in age from 18 to 32, but as the kids grow up and scatter across the country, it is most often the college-age or those just older who make up the majority nibbling fudge. This year was the first time I had to introduce kids to one another, several having never overlapped in the studio, and knowing of one another only by reputation. This always confuses me a bit because in my mind, all studios—past and present—blur together. All the kids are still seven-years-old and playing “Zachariah Zebra” and “Zoom Zoom, Witches’ Broom.” The sight of these grown-up kids with degrees and jobs and girlfriends and cats makes my head spin. 

In the beginning years of Christmas Tea, we had the sacred ritual of a Circle of Sharing, with “Five Fun Facts and One Lie.” We’d come together in the living room with the fireplace full of candles and the twinkling white lights on the mantle, tiny cups of tea in our hands (teacups need to be small and precious for the Christmas Tea), plates of cookies at the ready, and then the Circle of Sharing would begin. One by one, kids would offer Five Fun Facts from their lives, and One Lie. Our job was to tease out the lie.

Five Fun Facts and One Lie was lifted directly from years of studio performance class, when students were required to tell Five Fun Facts about the composer they were playing that day. One afternoon a kid said, “You know, Miss Amy, this would be more fun if we could do a lie, too.” And hence the game began.

There was no obvious Circle of Sharing this year, although we did find ourselves in a big circle nevertheless. There were lots of facts exchanged. And probably some lies too.

But looking around at these kids that I loved, I thought two things:

Thank goodness I no longer have to fuss about their practice charts.

and

Right here is a complete chapter of my life.

I had been thinking about life chapters all fall. My current studio is particularly young again; I have few high school students, having graduated so many seniors over the last few years. In many respects, however, I think my present roster is stronger than ever, full of eager kids who are quickly becoming nimble and creative and very individual pianists. Most weeks I have fewer fights about practice charts, but if I could harness the pure energy of the fidgeting and wiggling among the Little Ones, I could light up entire small nations. Or at least Massachusetts. And there is a lot of Zachariah Zebra these days. A lot.

Which made looking around the room that afternoon during Christmas Tea all the more dear. These kids did not wiggle anymore. They had thoughtful and interesting things to say about their lives and the state of the world. They politely filled one another’s tiny cups and heated up hot water in the kitchen when the tea pots were emptied. These grown kids, who as children did not always remember to bow after they performed, carried dishes to the sink when they had finished, and helped me clear the table and blow out candles. It was magical.

But bittersweet, too, because that is a chapter of my life that has a clear beginning and ending. That is the period that represents the first 20 years here in New Mexico, when I was building up a studio from nothing. I did my graduate degree in educational esychology when I was teaching these kids, which meant they were the subjects of my research projects and published articles. I was the “new young piano teacher” in town back then; these kids’ parents are older than I am. Although I was not new to teaching when I had these kids in lessons, I was still—sometimes painfully! —figuring things out. I was less consistent in my requirements, less sure of my sequencing.

Although I am still figuring things out (trying to discern the perfect holiday balance, the ideal chord progression sequencing, the rituals my soul needs most), I am now the “mature and experienced” piano teacher. Some of the parents in my present-day studio call me “ma’am,” which does gives one pause. “Amy, will you teach our kids?” 19-year-old Caroline asked me at one point during the afternoon tea. I looked at her. “Do you want me to?” I responded, a bit taken aback.

The lines will continue to blur. Every December new kids will join the Christmas Tea circle as they move out of the week-to-week place in the studio and into the next chapters of their lives. I will have to introduce more and more kids to each other as the years go by. I will become as one kid suggested, “a grandmother” to the next generation, perhaps teaching Caroline’s future children, still fumbling my way through scale sequencing and ear tunes. Still teaching “Zoom Zoom” and “Zachariah Zebra.”

“You know, Miss Amy,” someone said as the kids were collecting their coats and leaving, “we all grew up in this house.”

 It was a very sweet thing to say, and it could be just talk, just a lie. But as a new year begins and the next chapter of my teaching life turns another page, I’ll take it as the truth.