Part of my purpose in writing this blog is to leave something of myself behind for my kids to read when I’m gone. As such, there are going to be posts where I just go off reminiscing of the olden days.

Hold on to your butts.

When I was in first or second grade my grandparents hauled their old piano out of their house and delivered it to our basement. This piano was old enough to have ivory keys, but also old enough to be missing several pieces of the ivory keys. I’m not sure if it was ever tuned properly, and it was a beast, but this was my first piano.

My mom was my first piano teacher. We had a beginner book, we had a piano, but we did not have the right vibe. My mom is not a great teacher and I think we both quickly realized this was going to work much better if a professional teacher was acquired.

My next piano teacher was a real piano teacher, but she moved away after my first year of lessons. She was unremarkable, and I only remember that her son was in my class at school. I can’t even remember her name.

And then we get to my real piano teacher, that Ozymandias of my musical memory, Kathryn.

Kathryn was a talented musician who merely tolerated her young students and always used a purple pen to mark up the music. Her studio was in the family room of her house, and she had somehow managed to squeeze in two(!) baby grand pianos, several keyboards, and an entire wall of sheet music.

I still remember the dread of walking into that room on weeks when I had not practiced enough. My sister and I had lessons back-to-back and had a standing agreement that whoever had not practiced enough would get to go second, thus gaining an extra thirty minutes to work with the unpracticed material at the keyboard.

Sometimes neither of us had practiced enough, and those were bad weeks. We would argue about who would be first to disappoint Kathryn. Sometimes I lost the argument and then I would be the one to carefully take my seat on the piano bench, heart pounding. I would start in on the first measure thinking it was going to turn out okay and she wouldn’t notice, and then by the third measure I would have already missed two of the B flats and the rhythm would have fallen apart and Kathryn would be livid.

“Did you practice at all this week?” she would ask, even though she already knew the answer. She would huff for the rest of the lesson, as if I had personally offended both her and Sergei Rachmaninoff with my lack of practicing. My sister and I both got kicked out of lessons early at least once for not practicing enough.

Both of my siblings took piano lessons from Kathryn for years, and for a while my mother did too. This necessarily led to the Era of Two Pianos in our house. My mom found an awesome old upright in the classified ads and that piano still sits in the upstairs living room of her house. It’s not an attractive piano but it sounds amazing despite being tuned exactly twice in the thirty years she has had it. Four people taking piano lessons plus two pianos resulted in a constant parade of music and missed accidentals in our house for a while.

This was before the age of Musicnotes.com, so when choosing what songs to play we were dependent on both Kathryn’s library of sheet music and her limited interest in anything composed after 1965. At some point of mastery there was a fork in the road of sheet music and we had two choices for the coming years of piano: “classical” or “modern.” Modern was just a code word for jazz, it seemed, so I picked “classical” and that is how I developed a lifelong appreciation for Bach and a lifelong distaste for Bartok.

In my last year of middle school, Kathryn took a sabbatical. My mom managed to find yet another temporary piano teacher whose name I do not remember. This teacher worked in a little room attached to the local record store. She had a computer with cool composition programs on it. She gave us more freedom to pick out our own music, resulting in some interesting choices that year.

“Well, let’s hear what you’ve been playing,” Kathryn said that next September when we were back in her family room studio with the twin baby grands. I proudly placed my fingers on the keys and launched into a gorgeous arrangement of My Heart Will Go On from the hit movie Titanic. Kathryn just sighed heavily and closed her eyes as if praying for strength.

Kathryn insisted on memorization of your performance piece for the annual spring recital. There was nothing more shameful than walking up to the big grand piano at the front of the church in your nice clothes and bringing your music with you. I think I only failed to memorize twice in the eight years I played in her recitals. Memorization or not, I was always a nervous wreck about recitals, especially as I improved and my named dropped closer and closer to the end of the program every year. My heart would pound harder with every song leading to mine.

Kathryn was an amazing pianist herself, and really should have been a performer rather than a teacher but I suppose there aren’t many opportunities for profitable performance in my small hometown. I remember one time I watched her perform a piece that I knew pretty well; I was astonished to hear several mistakes! I mentioned this to my mom.

“Yes, but she just kept playing, right?” my mom asked. I agreed that Kathryn had kept playing as if nothing had happened. “That’s the trick,” my mom said knowingly.

I performed in a senior recital with two of my closest friends and we were great. I played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and Telemann’s Fantasia in D Minor, which is the only one of the three I failed to memorize. At the time I thought the Rachmaninoff was the height of my ability, but I’ve since decided that an emotionally tuned Clair de Lune requires a lot more skill than the pounding wide chords of the Rachmaninoff. I still play the Debussy from time to time when I want to challenge myself and feel melancholy at the same time.

I think about Kathryn a lot now because my kids are currently taking piano lessons and their teacher is basically the opposite of her. Their teacher seems to love teaching kids despite the many challenges. She finds fun songs for them to play, and will spend hours searching out a just-right arrangement of whatever weird video game song they have requested. My youngest is interested in composition, and she is happy to shift the piano primer book into the background and instead work with him on chord theory. Recitals are built to be fun, not stressful. Memorization is encouraged but very optional.

I love this gentle approach for my kids, and they have a great rapport with their teacher. But I don’t feel like I missed out in any way. I loved my teacher and I think she loved me despite my flawed practice record. I still own a bunch of sheet music marked up in her purple pen. And thanks to that purple pen I still never miss the high E flat in the eighteenth measure of Clair de Lune.