Piano

Piano

“Piano lessons are my worst enemy.”

– Ella Fredrickson (Age 9)

I started piano lessons in 1st grade and I enjoyed them for exactly one day. I had seen my older sister, Marin, do her first lesson and I was so intreged. I sat down at that big grand piano, ready to learn. I don’t know if I learned any piano that day, but I definitely learned how to hate piano. It became abundantly clear, very quickly, that I had no natural talents at piano. Pair that to my non-existent practicing and piano soon became my least favorite thing in the world. Every Tuesday I had to go to Bea Langford’s home and sit at the piano and try and BS my way through a lesson. It’s hard to explain why you continue to not improve and why it's been 3 weeks and you still can’t play your song. Bea wasn’t messing around either. She was a 70 year old woman that played tennis twice a week, went skiing in Vail every winter, didn’t let you lean against the walls or sit on the guest bed, recorded all our songs on a tape recorder from the 1960’s, and also carried her dead husband’s ashes around in a plastic bag. She was a terrifying woman.

In an attempt to actually make me practice Bea would make me practice logs, lists of every day of the week where I could fill in how much I practiced each day. The goal was for me to do a half hour or forty-five minutes each day. But here’s the thing: I never practiced. So Tuesday after school I would rush home, collect all the pencils, pens, and markers I could find and try to fill out the practice log. I tried to vary the handwriting, colors, times, to make it look as if I practiced every day. Usually there wasn’t enough time for me to do a super convincing job. Then I’d get to my lesson and Bea would count up my hours,

“Wow, you did 45 hours this week” She would say and I would nod my head. Then I would be asked to play the piece that I had supposedly spent a full work week on and low and behold I still wouldn’t know anything.

My sister and I were some of the few white people that took piano lessons from Bea Langford. Most of her clientele were Korean. Most of her clientele were a heck of a lot better than us. Unfortunately for Marin and I we all performed in the same recitals. Her other students would get up there and crank out jaw-dropping mozart piece that went on for like 6 minutes. Then Marin and I would follow with our 2 minute, book one, duet named “Flower”, that ended up only being 45 seconds because I accidently missed the whole middle part, and then Marin would speed up and somehow we’d end at different times. We’d turn around and the whole room would be cringing. Luckily, another student would come behind us, and the audience would forget about the disaster that just happened while they listened to a song some kid wrote himself. Then everyone would be invited to swim in Bea’s pool after the recital and Marin and I were the only ones who ever swam.

On one occasion, I was in was in my lesson with Bea while Marin was in the waiting room (which was actually just her guest bedroom in the basement. This was, because Marin always made me go first so she could somehow learn everything before her lesson. Anyway, while she was in the waiting room she decided that she had to go to the bathroom. She took a massive dump in Bea’s ancient and tiny toilet and she couldn’t get it to flush down. So my grandma, who always took us to our weekly lessons, got a plunger and tried to plunge it down. Suddenly the turd disappeared. My grandma decided to bring the plunger back into the laundry room where she had found it and as soon as the plunger was hovering over the white carpet, the poop made a reappearance. It fell, almost in slow motion, and landed right on Bea Langfords pristine white carpet. You can imagine my grandmother’s horror as she is scrubbing the carpet and Bea comes around the corner. Bea was speechless. My grandma committed the most selfless act I have ever witnessed and said,

“I had an accident.”

I quit piano lessons my freshman year of highschool. I have enjoyed it every day. I cannot remember a note.