Piano Teachers and Biscuits
23 Jul 2010 1 Comment
This morning I woke up and I thought to myself, “what time is it? I’m hungry! I had better get over to the Westside before they run out of my favorite ham and cheese biscuits.” Silly Westside, not even keeping enough biscuits to last until lunch time. Can’t go for lunch, have to go for breakfast. Sometimes I even call before I go just to make sure they have them so that I don’t waste a trip if they don’t. In fact, I called twice this week and missed the biscuits both times, which increased my determination to get one today. But I didn’t have to call this morning, because I made sure to go first thing.
On the walk to the Westside, I thought about the intimacy that I have with my cafes. For example: I know what they have at the Westside and I know what I like. I know how much it costs, and that they serve it only on the weekdays and not on the weekends, and I know that they are likely to run out by 11. And at the Cafe Trieste, I know the baristas by name, and they know me, and I know what they have and how much it costs, and what I like, and when they’re likely to run out of it. I love that kind of familiarity — I love that the baristas smile when they see me again — I feel like they have an interest in my life, even if they don’t know the exact details of it as well as I know the price of coffee. They notice when I don’t come, and they notice when I am well or preoccupied or sleepy. And yeah, I know, they’re just doing their job, and I am just buying my breakfast, but there are layers and layers of buttery sweetness to our little ritual that go beyond my handing them the money and them giving me the biscuit.
At this point, I could make this post about cafes, but I think that I am going to veer off in the direction of repetition. The intimacy of familiarity.
Because this morning, as I was waking up, drifting in and out of sleep, my childhood piano teacher, Mrs. Van Norman, who passed out of her body maybe eight years ago decided to say hello to me. I, in my hypnogogia, was stricken with the power and beauty of the love and connection that extends beyond the grave.
Our relationship was full of the intimacy of repetition and ritual. I saw her once a week for almost 14 years. She taught me to practice practice practice! Every day, no matter what. The first thing she would ask, when we started our lesson, was “did you practice?” And of course we knew we’d better say yes! And if there was a tricky part, we’d just have to do it again. And again, and again. And if we did it well, we should do it again, because doing it again when it’s good is so beautiful.
But, believe it or not, there is such a thing as too much practice. I was astonished once, when she told me to stop practicing the piece that I was going to play for a piano competition. She said that I was starting to get tired of it, and putting it away for a little while would help.
My two brothers and I were her only students at that late period in her life. She had said she wasn’t taking any more students, but when she met us she couldn’t help herself because we were so cute and sweet! We were the apples of her eye, and I believe she stuck around longer in her physical body because there was such pleasure for her in that transaction. She had a job: to guide us on the straight and narrow path of the classical piano tradition, and our job was to be taught.
But she didn’t only teach us about music. She loved music, and she loved us, and so every lesson was mainly about love. Loving Mrs. Van Norman, and showing it to her by being faithful to the practice of the piano. Loving Beethoven, who is so very easy to love, and loving Bach, whose intricate mathematical inventions I connected with very easily. But sometimes it was harder — Chopin was not so easy for me, for instance. I remember her saying once, when I was blasting through a nocturne, “Marian, a nocturne is not an invention! I think you need to go fall in love with someone, and then come back and fall in love with the spirit of Chopin.”
And so anyway, there was Mrs. Van Norman this morning, who went away from this physical plane, but resurfaced in my consciousness for a moment, to remind me of the wisdom and virtue in ritual, in practice. All relationship is practice, and all practice is relationship, and all relationship is about the dance of going away and coming back.
You see, when you meet something once, like a cafe or a person or a piece, there is an exciting kind of unfamiliarity about it. New things to discover! But in the newness, you can miss a lot. You don’t have a chance to notice the nuances of the different kinds of ways that it can be. You don’t know whether you’ll be $3.50 worth of satisfied with that biscuit, or whether it’s likely to be stale. You don’t notice that there are new pictures on the wall, as opposed to the old ones, or if that man likes to sit outside in the front on the weekends around 5pm. You don’t know if the new person is having a good day or a bad one, based on their demeanor, because you don’t know the way they usually are. You don’t know what parts to anticipate, which ones will be tricky, and what you’ll really like, with music, until you’ve played through it a few times.
A lot of books are the best when reading them for the first time, which is why I mostly don’t read a book more than once. A favorite book would have to be one that I want to get into over and over again, admiring it from every angle, soaking up new details every time I read it, remembering what I was thinking or what I was doing the last time I read it. The limitations of my time/space reality do not permit me to have this kind of familiarity with every book that I own or come across, for there are far too many books in the world, and too many words that have been written. But the ones that really do it for me like that — there is something special about that, even because I must choose them over others.
There are many ways of coming back to something. Every time I come back to write, I am nurturing my relationship with writing. Every time I come back to a specific piece of writing, I am having my relationship with writing and my relationship with that piece of writing. And even, when I read something else that was written, I engage with my relationship with writing. And while I realize that it’s best to put in the time every day, there are times when it really is better to put something away for a rest before coming back to it.
This is the essence of true romance, I believe — the putting away, and coming back, and the feeling excited by the newness created by the absence and loving the oldness and the newness all at the same time. Each new time adding a layer. Layers and layers, I muse, as I take a bite of my biscuit.
