My oldest brother got all the musical talent in our family. He taught himself the banjo when he was twelve and the fiddle when he was in college. He joined a bluegrass band and married the accordion player. Seeing the joy music brought him made me believe that being good at an instrument was one of the keys to happiness.
I’d suffered through four years of piano lessons as a child, but instead of learning, I’d grown frustrated by my inability to make the piano sound like music. My husband had his own musical childhood trauma from the French horn lessons his mother had insisted he take. It seemed the music in our lives would be limited to our record collection.
When we had children, music filled our house for a time. Our oldest learned to play the recorder, and those squeaky notes gave way to the beauty of Bach on a flute. One son took violin, and the other discovered the drums. For ten years I made dinner while dancing to the beat of his practice sessions in the basement.
The kids and their instruments moved out years ago, but recently my husband took up the trumpet, reviving the skills from his long-ago French horn lessons. He’s even joined a New Orleans–style street band that plays pop songs and folk tunes, giving every piece their own raucous take. Last week they played “Down by the Riverside” at a local political rally, and I was moved to tears as my husband made his trumpet soar.
On the advice of our sister-in-law, the accordionist, he now practices every day, coming up from the basement only when his lips are sore. My neighbor told me that I must love my husband very much to put up with all that “racket.” I was confused. Racket? To me it’s the loveliest sound in the world.
Lucy Garbus
Florence, Massachusetts
Having met someone on Bumble who is originally from Russia, I’ve started learning Russian so I can speak to him in his first language. It took me eight days to properly pronounce hello, which sounds like “zdravstvuyte.”
Though Dmitrii’s English is good, he apologizes for it constantly. He was a lawyer in Russia and fled the country after being drafted to fight in Ukraine as a reprisal for protesting the war. He now works as an appliance repairman but has no regrets. “Today is where we are,” he says. “What happened before is not who we are now.”
We spend hours together one day at the Getty Museum, where he insists on holding a parasol over my head in the gardens. When I show him my favorite painting, he examines it carefully and asks questions.
Have I mentioned that his eyes are the color of the sea? I do not know how to say this in Russian yet.
Sometimes I worry the things I say make no sense to him. “Can you understand my accent?” I ask. He smiles and says, “Oh yes, I understand you perfectly. I could teach you to speak Russian with no accent, but something would be lost. The way you speak gives good feelings.”
One day he texts and calls me “zayka.” I have to look it up. It’s a young rabbit, a common term of endearment in Russian. Inside I glow like a flame, but I am no bunny. During my chemo treatments for breast cancer, I was visited by the spirit of a tiger that would take me on its back when my body hurt too much. I text back in English: I am a tigress.
Dmitrii doesn’t ask for an explanation. He simply calls me Tigress from then on: tigritsa.
I practice saying, I would like to cook dinner for you sometime, in Russian until I’m sure he’ll understand. He says yes and brings Korean wine and prawns because they remind him of the island where he grew up. He insists on helping me cook and doing the dishes. “No,” I tell him, “I am trying to take care of you.”
“Grab a towel,” he replies, “and it will go twice as fast.”
Standing next to him by the sink, I move closer and kiss him for the first time. He kisses me back, then says in a serious tone, “I have not been in a relationship for three years.”
I have not been held so gently in decades.
When he leaves, I walk him outside and kiss him again. “Good night, Tigress,” he tells me: Spokoynoy nochi, Tigritsa.
Today it has been one month since I’ve heard from him. I continue to practice my Russian. I have learned how to ask, Where are you? I can say, I am here. I have not yet learned how to ask, Why?
Frankie Drayus
Los Angeles, California
On February 15, 1973, I made a commitment to meditate every day without fail, and I’ve kept that commitment for fifty-three years. People have a hard time wrapping their heads around this and often ask me what I’ve gotten out of it. They want to know: What happens when someone sits quietly every day for five decades?
In the first five years of meditation I began to notice the patterns of my thoughts and emotions. I could see the ways my mind had been conditioned, and I confronted my entrenched beliefs. After ten years of meditation I became calmer and quieter, and my intuitive and empathetic tendencies became stronger.
After twenty-five years things shifted into the realm of the mysterious. The world remained the same, but my perception of it changed, allowing me to experience moments of extraordinary wonder and beauty. At first they were brief, lasting only a few hours once or twice a month. Then they grew longer and started happening more frequently. Now, on rare occasions, this inner bliss may last for days or even weeks.
My meditation practice has outlived all of my marriages, jobs, and homes. For me there is nothing more important.
Stephen Leslie
Monroe, Connecticut
When I started playing tennis in middle school, I smashed the ball with an unforgiving pace. I hit so hard the other girls couldn’t return anything I sent over the net. One boy could, but the coach wouldn’t allow boys and girls to play each other. So I spent practices hitting balls against a wall or serving into a fence. At home I’d hit balls against our garage door, sometimes leaving dents that my dad was none too happy about.
In high school the coach had no problem letting me practice with the varsity boys, which caused a few guys to quit the team. Most who remained addressed me with contempt, but a handful would practice with me for hours. Like me, they played for the pure pleasure of it.
Word got around, and boys and men from other sports—both students and coaches—started dropping by the courts to try their hand against me. Some approached these games with curiosity and respect. (The boy I had a crush on was one of them. I reined in my usual force with him, wanting to keep the ball in play as long as possible so our time together would last.) Others oozed disdain on the court, believing they could dominate a woman in any sport. I showed them no mercy. They usually got through only three games before they’d had enough.
My next-door neighbor read about me in the newspaper and challenged me to a match on his tennis court, with one condition: I was not allowed to use my infamous first serve. I beat him despite the handicap and was never invited back.
In 2019 a poll was released that caused a stir: People were asked if they thought they could win a point against world champion Serena Williams. Only 3 percent of women said yes, compared to 12 percent of men. I was not surprised.
Alison Lyons
Loveland, Colorado
In 2021 my wife received notice that her naturalization interview would take place in three months. We had married just six months earlier, during the first summer of the COVID pandemic. Unable to gather with our families, we’d said our vows on the summit of a local volcano, Mount Baker. Now we made a new vow: We would practice together twenty minutes a day for the citizenship exam.
There were one hundred possible questions. She would be asked ten and needed to correctly answer six. Some of the questions were straightforward, the answers simple to memorize: Name one author of the Federalist Papers. (Our favorite: Publius.) Other questions sounded open-ended but required precise responses: What is the rule of law? (No one is above the law.)
Some questions led to new discoveries about each other: During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States? (I learned that her grandfather, a union leader in Chile, had been murdered by the military after the 1973 coup against the socialist government.) Before he was president, Eisenhower was a general in which war? (She learned that my grandfather and his four siblings had all served in World War II and had returned home either broken or not at all.)
On the morning of the exam we kissed longer than usual before I left for work. A few hours later my phone buzzed. There she was in a photo, beaming outside the immigration building in a blue dress and red raincoat, holding a small American flag.
Two years later we welcomed a child. If it was a boy, we’d planned to name him Publius, but we had a girl. We named her after our local volcano instead.
John Tuthill
Seattle, Washington
Two summers ago, after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer, a friend of mine took up gardening. She’d always wanted to garden, and she was done putting it off. She would send me photos of her lush green plants and ripe vegetables.
I told her I’d been thinking about starting a garden too, but I didn’t want to deal with dirt, bugs, or the scorching Texas heat.
“Have you considered hydroponic gardening?” she asked.
“Hydro-what?”
A week later a box arrived at my door. Inside was a hydroponic unit I could use to grow plants indoors—her gentle way of saying, No more excuses.
Twice I failed to bring the seedlings to harvest, but with each attempt I learned something new. On the third try, thanks to tips from members of a gardening club I’d joined, I managed to grow herbs and peppers. I’d always wanted to snip fresh herbs straight into my cooking. Now I could say with some confidence that I knew a thing or two about gardening.
Recently another friend asked me to look after a plant while he goes away for a few weeks. It’s an indoor shrub that needs “hardening” before he can transplant it outdoors. Though I know the theory of hardening—easing a plant into outdoor conditions by gradually exposing it to sun and temperature changes—I’ve never done it. But my friend says he trusts me. Once again I’m practicing the art of trying something new.
Tokunbo Oluwasanjo
Houston, Texas
At the age of eleven I saw Burt Lancaster in the movie Jim Thorpe, All-American, and it made me want to become a runner and compete in the Olympics, like Thorpe. The problem was, I attended a Catholic school that didn’t have a track team. Undeterred, I ran around the campus and through the adjacent forest. I thought if I just kept running, I would become a star.
After graduating, I enrolled in a university in the mountains in the Philippines, where I joined the track team. Most mornings I got up at 5:30 to run. The roads were hilly, and the air was thin, which helped me develop great lung capacity.
The next year I transferred to a college in the lowlands, and my year of training at high altitude paid off. Within a few months I was the school’s top runner. At the regional track meet, however, I could manage only second place in the 10,000 meters and fourth place in the 5,000 meters. To add insult to injury, when I competed in the Philippine National Open in 1974, I was lapped twice by other runners.
I kept running through most of college, in the hot sun and the monsoon rains. Sometimes I would run in place in my bedroom while watching myself in the mirror. I did laps after nightfall at the track. The 1976 Olympics came and went.
In my twenties I moved to California, and over the next fifteen years I competed in numerous 5ks, 10ks, half-marathons, and marathons, aiming to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I failed by about five minutes, but I don’t regret any of it. I couldn’t have gone any faster or practiced any harder. Some things were never meant to be.
At night I still have occasional dreams about circling the track. Then I awake to the reality of being seventy-plus years old with arthritis in both knees. So much for wanting to be the next Jim Thorpe!
Sal Morano
Corona, California
Author Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in any skill. Maybe he’s right. I’ve never been patient enough to find out. I mostly like to do things I already do pretty well, because they’re fun. Working on things I’m lousy at is frustrating and makes me feel clumsy.
When I played shortstop in a men’s softball league, I asked an acquaintance who was a former major-league infielder to help me with my fielding. I figured he’d hit me some grounders, adjust my stance, and maybe give me tips about glove work. He didn’t. He sat me down on the ground opposite him and rolled a softball toward me. My job was to cradle it cleanly with my hand. Roll, catch, roll, catch. For half an hour.
I thought he was nuts, but later I realized what he was doing: stripping the skill down to its smallest components until each motion became automatic. Only then did we move on to grounders. When we did, my reactions were quicker, and my glove work was cleaner.
Practicing, I realized, is about humility: the willingness to sit and do some small thing again and again—maybe ten thousand times—until you get it right.
Steve Pantell
Oakland, California
Prior to a study-abroad year in Nepal, I took an eight-week class to learn the language. I strained to grasp the unfamiliar sounds and the Nepali sentence structure, which was so different from English. When I tried to speak, I felt like rocks filled my mouth.
Months into my stay I still struggled with the language and was feeling defeated. To rub salt into the wound, some relatives of the Nepali family I lived with were hosting other foreign students whose language skills far surpassed my own.
Halfway through the program, I considered going home. Though I loved Nepal, I did not think I had the necessary mettle. But the Nepali people were kind and patient as I stumbled over words, and my sheer desire to get to know them kept me there.
All the months of practicing eventually paid off. Sentences tumbled out of my mouth without a thought, even in my dreams. I became the most fluent in my student cohort, and I extended my stay three months past the end of the program.
As a result, it is second nature for me to be kind and patient when I encounter non-native English speakers in my own country.
Kimberly Ford
Portland, Oregon
In my first year of nursing school I found myself drawn to Pamela, a fellow student with ocean-blue eyes. She was smart, articulate, and as kind as she was gorgeous. I began to feel oddly excited whenever we were assigned to the same patient case. I’d dated a few men, but I’d never felt this way about any of them, nor about another woman. I wondered if Pamela felt it too.
One afternoon our class practiced blood draws. There was an artificial arm available, but our instructor advised us it was better to use a real arm if we felt comfortable doing so.
Pamela and I were partners. “You can practice on me first,” she said.
Though I wasn’t squeamish about drawing blood, my mouth suddenly went dry, and my fingers trembled as I touched her skin. What the hell was wrong with me? I looked up and met her blue-eyed gaze.
“You’re doing just fine,” she said and smiled.
In a burst of courage I asked her to have coffee with me after class. At the café I admitted I was feeling chemistry between us. She told me I wasn’t imagining it.
We didn’t stop talking for three hours, as that coffee turned into our first date. After we walked back to our cars, I leaned in to kiss her. There was no need to practice that.
Kathleen Stone
Citrus Hills, Florida
Creativity came easily for me as a child. I drew, colored, and made intricately woven lanyards. Swapping songs was a rite of passage in the schoolyard. Summers were spent pretending to be a mermaid in the pool and wading in the nearby creek to see what I could find.
Now that my days are filled with responsibilities, I don’t have time to be creative. Work steals hours from play, and the barrage of social media creates an endless stream of content to compare myself to. Why bother making something if it won’t look as good as the examples I see online?
But then I think of my ten-year-old self, who created not to be seen but to have fun. So I’ve added “creativity time” to my to-do list, just as I do the gym and chores. I go to nonjudgmental spaces like junk-journal meetups and an ugly-art club. I’m teaching myself to sew, something I always wanted to learn. I might turn out to be bad at these things, but if I keep doing them, maybe I can recapture that freedom I grew up with.
A.B.
Oroville, California
The body changes with age. You notice it in small ways at first: You wake up tired. You forget names. You look in the mirror and don’t recognize the man brushing his teeth. The hair, once a source of pride, has thinned to a whisper. The belly that arrived uninvited refuses to leave.
I used to laugh at the way old men counted pills. Now I line them up like soldiers: one for cholesterol, one for blood pressure, one for nerves. Then the supplements: Magnesium. Zinc. Thiamine for neuropathy. My feet go numb sometimes. I rub them with menthol cream and pretend it’s a luxury.
I used to love sugar—cakes, soft drinks, spoons dipped in honey. Now I walk past pastries like they’re ex-lovers who broke my heart. My stomach protests if I eat anything after 7 pm.
These days I practice restraint—not just from sugar and salt, but from the impatience I felt when I was younger. When my grandson breaks a plate, I laugh instead of scolding him. When a telemarketer calls, I bless them instead of cursing. I’ve let go of old arguments I once thought I’d carry to my grave.
Harder is accepting that this body—this aching, softening vessel—is mine. It has carried me through wars and weddings, through heartbreak, laughter, and that one dance floor in 1972 where I moved like a man possessed.
Now I practice being kind to it. I put lotion on my legs, not just to soothe the skin but to say thank you. I carefully brush what’s left of my hair. Sometimes I hold my own hands and remember everything they’ve carried. They tremble a bit now, but they still know how to hold. How to open.
Marvin Garbeh Davis Sr.
Monrovia, Liberia
When I was seven years old, a special delivery arrived at my family’s house in Japan, where we were living due to my dad’s naval career: a Yamaha upright piano. My parents wanted my sisters and me to learn to play.
Our teacher, Mr. Hayashi, came every Wednesday. During my sisters’ lessons I sat in the kitchen and listened to him yell at them over their mistakes. Then it was my turn. I breathed through my mouth to avoid smelling Mr. Hayashi’s bad breath.
After a few months of this, my sisters quit, but Mr. Hayashi told my parents that I was something of a prodigy, already able to play Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. They encouraged me to strive for a career as a pianist.
When my family moved to the US, I began studying with an esteemed piano teacher named Mrs. Guy, who required her students to practice two hours a day, as well as rehearse with duet partners several times a week. We performed in endless recitals, competitions, and concerts.
Even in this environment, I stood out. Everyone expected me to become a professional musician.
Then I turned thirteen and discovered drugs and alcohol. Practicing two hours a day was way less interesting than getting high with my friends. Mrs. Guy admonished me to get back on track or risk being let go as her student. Instead I quit. My addictions grew worse and eventually took me to depths of degradation my thirteen-year-old self could never have imagined.
Forty years after I stopped playing, and several years after I got clean and sober, I began attending a church near my home in Brooklyn. Seeing me marveling at its beautiful organ, the pastor offered to teach me to play it. First he had me play something on the piano so he could gauge my skill level.
I sat down gingerly on the bench and began a Mendelssohn piece that was somehow still stored in my memory. Tears began to flow as my fingers roamed the keys. I had forgotten how blissful the piano makes me feel, how gratifying it could be to let the music come out of my fingers and my soul.
Since then I have been practicing up to two hours a day on both the piano and the organ. Mrs. Guy would be proud.
I used to regret my failure to fulfill my musical promise as a result of my drug and alcohol addictions. But there’s no point in regrets, and there’s no age limit on learning something new or reconnecting with my art. Practicing is no longer a chore. It’s a joyous expression of my gratitude for my sobriety and all the windows recovery has reopened for me.
Alison Watson
Brooklyn, New York
In the late 1990s swing music was in vogue. On weekends my wife and I would sit in our favorite club, mesmerized by the dancers twirling to the band’s performance. “We need to learn to dance like that!” my wife said.
Dancing had always been my Achilles heel. When I was an adolescent, my fear of girls, lack of rhythm, and self-consciousness formed a toxic mix. I was stiff and robotic on the dance floor. But after much hand-wringing, I bought my wife a gift certificate for lessons at a local dance studio for Christmas.
The first lesson felt like engaging in combat as I rotated through different partners. Seeing me struggle, the teacher pulled me aside for one-on-one instruction, but I simply couldn’t sync my movements to the beat. Humiliated, I decided I had two choices: quit—disappointing my wife and forfeiting the money I’d spent on the three-month course—or practice my ass off. I chose the latter.
The first step was to find the beat. For two days I listened to Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” tapping my thigh until I could feel the rhythm. Next I stood in front of the mirror and awkwardly shuffled my feet as I counted, “One and two, three and four, rock, step; one and two, three and four, rock, step.” Finally I began to add arm movements.
For the next few weeks I got up early every morning to practice before heading to work. During my lunch break I closed the office blinds, turned on a CD, and twirled an imaginary partner. After dinner I alternated between practicing alone and dancing with my wife to a Louis Prima compilation.
At our next class, when it was the teacher’s turn to be my partner, she smiled and told me how impressed she was with my improvement. I sheepishly confessed that I’d had to practice nonstop.
“That’s what the good ones do,” she said.
Scott Fleming
Eugene, Oregon
I was excited to attend a prestigious music conservatory. At least, I was until I realized a large portion of every student’s day—from three to eight hours, depending on their instrument—was spent alone in a practice room. These “rooms” were closet-size spaces that could barely accommodate an upright piano, a music stand, and a second instrument. I had to awkwardly position myself in a corner so my trombone slide wouldn’t hit the wall. The musty carpeting held decades of moisture from spit valves, and the walls—and even some pianos—were marred with graffiti and smeared with all nature of substances. (Thirty years later I can still see the so-called “Booger-muda Triangle.”) The windows had bars over the glass, I suppose so that if you got really depressed about your étude, you wouldn’t be tempted to jump.
I’d grown up practicing in the open spaces on my parents’ farm, playing Bach for the cattle in the fields. Before leaving school in the afternoon, I’d often play on the stage in the empty auditorium, where my favorite janitor would stop to listen. The way I saw it, my sound was formed in part by the spaces that contained it. Though I knew I was privileged to be studying on scholarship, the conservatory had come to feel like a jail. I considered dropping out but instead added a second major, in English. In the vast campus libraries, the big classrooms, and the endless space possible within a poem, I found room to breathe.
M.B.
Würzburg, Germany
Roland pulled into my driveway in his yellow Renault. On the top of the car was a large blue plastic L—for leerling, the Dutch word for “learner.” To me the L stood for “loser.” I was a fifty-seven-year-old student driver.
I’d been driving since I was sixteen and had logged hundreds of thousands of miles in the US with both automatic and manual transmissions, conquering snowstorms, downpours, and parallel parking. But when my Dutch wife and I moved to the Netherlands, I became a timid driver. My inability to read the road signs triggered panic. The constant presence of cyclists and the unfamiliar right-of-way rules overwhelmed me.
Still, I needed a Dutch license, which meant I had to pass a driving test. I followed fellow expats’ advice and signed up for lessons.
Roland, who was a big fan of Formula 1 racing, steered me to the most confounding traffic situations he could find, which only exacerbated my confusion. Sometimes he would make me pull over to lecture me on shifting and how to hold a steering wheel. After five lessons I told him I’d had enough.
“If you took the test today, you would not pass,” Roland said authoritatively.
A few weeks later I took it anyway. The examiner had me drive routes that weren’t half as complex as Roland’s, and my churning stomach settled. But then, near the end, I unwittingly drove nearly double the speed limit on a type of road I’d never seen.
“Slow down!” the examiner barked. “You’re on a special bicycle street!”
Back in his office, I expected to be reprimanded, but to my surprise the examiner told me I’d passed. “You made a big mistake,” he said, “but it’s obvious you’re an experienced driver.”
My wife bought me flowers. Roland graciously congratulated me. I wish I could say that getting my Dutch license magically transformed me into a confident driver, but that took a lot more time and practice. Still, I was proud that I had faced my fears and been willing to drive around town under the big blue L.
Diane Daniel
Veldhoven, the Netherlands
My mother was a hard worker who believed a day spent crossing tasks off a to-do list was a day well spent. In her final years, though, she was confined to bed in a care facility. I was haunted by the thought of her lying there, motionless and alone.
Once, between visits, I attempted to replicate her day, to better understand what the monotony was like. I lay flat in my bed, a cover pulled up to my waist, and stared at the ceiling, picking out details: a nick in the paint, a wisp of dust. I scanned my body, feeling my thighs against the sheets and my head against the pillow. My watch ticked away the minutes. My books and tablets out of view, I ruminated on my solitude, with no one to listen to my old yarns or the dreams of my younger self.
It must take tremendous strength to endure such a diminished existence, I thought. I could hardly imagine the diligence required to pass from this world to the next.
Dying is hard work.
Linda Steinhoff
Bay City, Michigan
People often ask me if I miss rowing. Two years after my last race, I still don’t have an answer.
I miss walking to the college boathouse with my best friends on golden fall mornings. I don’t miss walking home after dark in the New England winters, my wet hair freezing.
I miss the deeply satisfying collapse into bed at the end of the day, my muscles loose and tired. I don’t miss slogging half asleep through an elite education, so exhausted I felt like I was underwater.
I miss the discipline of waking up with the sun on weekend mornings. I don’t miss how little of my time was my own.
I miss the team eating every meal together, cramming in as many chairs as we could. I don’t miss the unspoken tension about our coaches’ private instructions to lose or gain weight or our furtive assessments of each other’s plates.
I miss the pride of achieving a new personal best. I don’t miss the crushing pressure to perform under all circumstances—feverish with COVID-19 or hyperventilating when my newly asthmatic lungs closed up.
I miss the giddiness and loud music in the locker room after Saturday-morning practice. I don’t have to miss the panic dreams about sleeping through my 5:24 am alarm, because I still have them.
I rowed competitively throughout middle school, high school, and college, for nine years in all. Only now am I meeting my adult self as I am without rowing. Though I tell people I’m glad I did it, I couldn’t have done it any longer.
Sarah Hope
Orange, California
In school nothing terrified me more than public speaking, so every presentation became a high-stakes test. Obsessed with being a perfect student, I rehearsed relentlessly in the mirror and into a tape recorder, trying to build confidence with repetition. But the more I practiced, the more nervous I became. My words grew stiffer and my heartbeat louder.
Many years later I got a job at a mental-health facility, where my duties included leading groups and teaching classes for new clients. My fixation on perfection was quickly overshadowed by the raw truth of the stories they shared. They spoke of their pain and loss in a way that was unpolished but deeply human.
Listening to them taught me the value of authenticity. I no longer rehearse before I speak. It’s more important to practice being myself.
Andy Roman
Greenacres, Florida
Neither my father nor my older brother would play baseball with me when I was little, so I would practice by myself. I’d throw up a tennis ball, hit it with my aluminum bat, chase it down, and then hit it again. I did this for hours, sometimes playing out entire Detroit Tigers games in my imagination, batting lefthanded for Lou Whitaker and righthanded for Alan Trammell. I dreamed of the day I’d make it big.
In Little League I was a star player for one glorious season, thanks to the hand-eye coordination I’d developed hitting those tennis balls. Then the other kids went through puberty before me. They threw much harder than I could, and my training methods proved no match. Still, I continued to practice solo in the front yard.
As an adult, I started coaching baseball. One of the perks of the job was that, after the kids went home, I had a regulation-size baseball diamond all to myself. I took a whole bucket of baseballs to the plate and pretended I was Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker. I was forty-four, but I could still dream.
Anup Sinha
Jupiter, Florida
My parents signed me up for piano lessons in first grade. At first I hated sitting on the uncomfortable bench and trying to interpret the foreign language of musical notes. My mother had to patiently guide me through songs, help me complete my theory assignments, and withstand my constant protests. Whenever I cried and begged to stop, she would encourage me to stay for five more minutes, play one more scale, run through a piece a final time.
As I improved, my mother left me to practice alone, but she was never far away. While I played, she’d call from the other room, “Nice job!” or, “That sounds great!”
After I grew up and went away to college, I practiced on the pianos in the music school, but something wasn’t right. Every time I finished playing, I found myself waiting for my mother’s encouraging voice.
Life got busier, and piano often fell by the wayside. I’d purchase new music and try to practice consistently, but every time my hands lifted off the keys, I would feel the hollow silence of the room.
On a recent visit home, while my mother prepared dinner, I wandered to the piano bench, sat down, and played one of the few pieces I know by heart: Mozart’s Sonata in C Major. At the end, as the last note trailed off, I noticed the sounds from the kitchen had quieted, and my mother’s voice floated in: “That was beautiful.”
Anna Bauer
St. Paul, Minnesota
