The Practice

 I am grateful that I took all those piano lessons. I admit that I may not have always shown it. It felt, at the time, like a chore that I was saddled with and not the kind of chore could be completed and then move on. It was a commitment to time I pretended not to have. Practicing felt like homework, and why would I volunteer for any more of that? 

In my head, even now, I imagine myself sitting down at the keyboard, cracking my knuckles and proceeding to play all today's biggest hits. I was never going to be a guitar player, though the idea that I might stayed in my wish box for years after that possibility closed. I could have stuck with the piano. I lived with one for eighteen years. I learned to read music and understand how it worked. But never enough to master it. 

Those piano lessons stuck with me. All these years later, when I listen to a song, I can see the notes flying at me. I appreciate the math. The composition. There was just enough music theory in my lessons to build an understanding of sharps, flats, major and minor. Somewhere in there, I even had a little vocal training wedged in there. I can look back now and say that all this knowledge was important to creating the person I became. 

But I wanted out. I could not see myself doing the things that it would take to make me anything but a pretty good piano player. Instead, my focus switched to playing tuba. I had the lungs for it, and all that prior music knowledge helped me move right along. When I finished junior high, I finished piano lessons. Somewhere in my head, I had equated piano lessons with something that little kids did. At fifteen, I was all grown up and ready to take the world by storm. Me and my tuba. 

My father used to grumble about my choice of instruments. Why couldn't I play piccolo or something that would fit in my pocket or backpack? Whenever it was time to haul the school's sousaphone from school to home or vice versa, it was a project that required all the space we had in the back of the station wagon. I was part of a band, after all, and rehearsing is something that bands do. I was down with that, because it was mostly a social thing. Even though I was in a band with other kids in band, it was still social. It was something I wasn't getting with piano. 

When I played in the high school stage band, I watched the keyboard player. He was pretty good. So good, in fact, that he ended up playing with Gloria Estefan after he graduated. I didn't get the sense that he practiced. Ever. He just sat down and music poured out of him. That was the talent thing. Somewhere along the line, I figured that was what was missing from my musical experience. 

And now, the piano that I grew up with sits behind me, having made the trip across the country after being lovingly sent to me by my mother to look after. When I turn around, my mind fills with long ago afternoons of scales and arpeggios, metronomes and fingering charts. 

It's never too late.