I used to play the piano. It almost feels like another life ago. I started when I was 5. It was my parents' idea, of course. Both of them had wanted to play the piano ever since they were young. However, neither of them got the opportunity to learn. I supposed it had been a dream of theirs for some time, seeing how we owned a piano that did nothing more than sit in the corner of a room that simply referred to as "the back". No one played it, tuned it, even so much as got a chance to look at on a daily basis. It just existed in that corner.
Eventually the piano was put to use as both my younger sister and I were enrolled in piano lessons. I took them for quite a long time. I played decently, learned to read music pretty well, even tried composing music of my own. However, I gave it up once I started high school. I just had a lot going on and piano just wasn't high on my list of things I wanted to spend my time doing.
However, that all changed the summer between my junior and senior year. I spent my summer with some of the most amazing people that I would ever have a chance to meet. And one of the things that most of us had in common was that we all played the piano. And for the first time, I met people who played for the musicality of it. Not because they were asked to play hymns at church or carols at Christmas. There was something about how they made the piano sound. Almost as if it were speaking in a language that I could only understand if I closed my eyes and gave myself over to it. It was amazing. Why had I not felt this before? Why had I not played like these guys did? Piano for me had always been so boring and methodical. It was nothing like what I was hearing now. I wanted to play like they did.
So my senior year I went back to playing the piano, with a new teacher. She was fun, very different from my last teacher in teaching style. My last teacher, though she was good, kind of let me get away with things. Little things, nothing egregious. But getting a new teacher, she never allowed for those type of things. My being lazy and lackadaisical when it came to practice would not be tolerated any more. And we played different kinds of music. Music that was better suited to what I liked. I remember something my teacher told me whenever I got frustrated trying to learn this new stuff. I remember there were so many notes on the page and it looked daunting.
"Just think of the notes as letters," she told me, "The letters become words and the words become sentences." For some reason, that made sense to me. So practice wasn't as difficult. Later that year, I ended up playing for my Baccalaureate. People said that I played very nicely. But it was my recital were I think playing the piano finally became solidified in my soul.
My teacher only had two students who were going to perform that day among the battery of others from other teachers. The chairs were full. My family was there, dressed to the nines. It was the day after my graduation. All my friends were spending the day at an amusement park. But I was here, playing the piano. And to be honest, I didn't want to be anywhere else. I wanted to perform, wearing my dress and makeup.
So, I played, and something interesting happened. I forgot the audience. I forgot about my family watching. I forgot that everything around me existed. It was just me and the piano. It was just the sentences of notes in front of me, making a story. For the first time, I actually felt what I was playing and was completely lost in it. And probably for the first time, I made my music speak to those who were listening.
That was many years ago. A lifetime ago. But I still remember it clearly. The day that I finally made my music speak. The day that others closed their eyes and gave themselves over to it, to hear the words and sentences and story that I told with my fingers and a piano.
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