Blink, and already 2022 morphs into a caricature, a cliché of life seen through the distorted lens of so-called normalcy.

Last month, I had breakfast with a friend.

During a recent lesson with a precocious five-year-old, I decided halfway through her playing of Mozart's Allegro that I didn’t want to hear the repeat.

Recently a Little One and I were talking about Halloween.

Max and I were doing an online piano lesson.

Of course, she had a piano, she told me when she called inquiring about lessons.

"Miss Amy!" Ella squealed as she bounded into the studio this week.

Truth be told, my students would tell me everything I need to know if I would only listen.

Since the beginning of time, most kids who learn to play the piano do so in a prescribed and formulated manner.

I think it was somewhere flying over Greenland when I realized: air travel is just a highly concentrated version of travel in general.

Once I played a set of pieces on a concert shared by a number of musicians.

Peter and I were discussing his piece for our upcoming performance class.

“…Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes…”

–Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Truth be told, I’ve been a bit stuck lately.

In Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of a time when she and her Brazilian fiancé Felipe were traveling in Vietnam.

Thursday Charlie came dragging into his lesson.

It should be ordinary time.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

-Jane Hirshfield

Once, some years ago, this happened:

Some fun facts about pandemic piano lessons in the Ten Thousand Stars Studio: