The piano lady is no longer Mrs. Anderson

So after grocery shopping for the first time in three weeks, I came home to a typical e-mail from my mother.

As I'm a lucky kid whose parents still feed her, and because my so-called permanent residences typically change annually, my bills are send to my parents' address. Mom's always great about letting me know what kind of money I've spent.

It went something like this:

Hi Kelsey,

How was your day? I'm paying bills.

She then interjects that $24.99 is due to my credit card account.

And closes with:

Love,
Mom


But, it was her post script that prompted me to write:

The piano lady says hi! She's not Mrs. Anderson anymore.

My mother must have seen her in the dental office. With a father as a dentist and a mother a hygienist, I typically both brush and floss and receive greetings through the grapevine. But if she's not Mrs. Anderson, who is she?


Such a statement aptly jogs the memory: the soft hearted woman in whose basement I'd spent nearly all my childhood Monday afternoons is no longer the same. Unlike my mother's former teacher, she never hit my knuckles when I stuck a G instead of a C, and never reprimanded me when I'd blunder through a piece of music I'd obviously not practiced. When I started at six, I played by ear and learned staff lines and key signatures as an afterthought. I memorized and performed competition pieces and played a duet on Northrop's stage in an honors concert at eight. But by sixteen, I was enjoying her company during my hour long lessons more than I wanted to learn Bach's piceces in my Suzuki classics. She'd adjust her glasses beneath her salt and pepper hair as I painstakingly picked through a piece, before gently indicating it could use some work. But she never squirmed or stopped me; her patience was probably a direct gift from God. She drank warm, red juice from coffee mugs and loved her cats and her baby grand. She encouraged me to play more jazz and embellish the pieces on which I was working. And I did. I'd add new syncopation in a rift of eighth notes, fermatas as the bass line plunked away... It was the only thing I ever practiced in those last few years of lessons.

But it's amazing the kind of bubble that surrounds you as a child. You learn piano theories, while theories of love aren't holding true. Not that love has ever been scientific. As it turns out, gentle Mrs. Anderson had been verbally abused by her husband for years and finally broke away during the last. How do you enter someone's home 52 times in a year for ten years and have an indication of her pain? Perhaps you're allowed naivete when you're sixteen, but why should that be an excuse for tunnel vision?