What We Don't Know

A number of people, over the course of my life, have pointed out that I am not a very trusting person. I have taken this observation to heart, but it does make me wonder just why they would be saying this about me. Paranoid? Not exactly, but I am willing to learn. This is especially true during election season, as we are inundated with "facts" and the attendant "fact checkers." I figure I'm just doing this for myself.
It might also have something to do with the way I grew up, at times, stretching the truth with my parents. My sins were primarily those of omission, leaving out key bits of information in hopes that if there was no direct interrogation on the subject that I could avoid having to confess. Over the past thirty-some years, I have made amends on most of those little white lies. The ones that stacked up over time to become some pretty nasty charcoal gray lies. The most innocent of those, it seemed at the time, were the ones I told about practicing the piano. At the end of the day, a metaphorical day that lands me here at fifty years old, I wish that I would have put in those hours way back when. I wouldn't be stuck in a house with a piano, occasionally standing in front of it, wishing that I had some mad skills to sit down and play the way I always wanted. That took a different kind of commitment than I was willing to give. Of course, my mother knew that my brothers and I could never have possibly squeezed in three full practice sessions in the time it took her to go to the grocery store. But that was our story, and we stuck to it.
The piano wasn't the only time I lied to my parents, but I know now that I reap what I once sowed, and so when I find out that my son was busy posting cat pictures on Facebook instead of studying for a chemistry test, it makes me sad. I want to distill the feeling I have, standing in front of that piano lacking the Mozart and Beethoven, and give it to him directly. I also know that it will be another thirty years before he feels it the way I do. And that's no lie.