Differing Forms of Grief...

When my mother died seven years ago, I decided to learn the piano. It wasn't the form I'd imagined my bereavement would take. Of course, as a child I did what every child with imagination and a great love of her parents would do. I sobbed myself to sleep on some nights imagining what it would like to be orphaned. Coming from a family whose only manifestation of musical talent was my younger brother's self-taught guitar-playing, this latent desire of mine might have seemed strange.
I would never have found time for piano lessons while my mother was alive, because a great deal of my spare time was spent in her company.

Every day, whether it had been spent teaching, or on a film set, would be concluded by visiting my mother who lived just a five minute walk away. The time spent with her was both precious and pleasurable, and I can say that taking up an instrument never crossed my mind. Not even when we would chuckle over how my son, when aged 8, took up the trumpet for a whole term. When asked by his grandmother why he had abandoned his lessons, he replied, "Well, I've learnt that now."
So we bought an ancient church hall upright piano and I took up lessons. The time I would have spent with my mother was spent forcing my pudgy, reluctant fingers up and down scales. I could hear my mother's amused voice in my ear, "So I've been holding you back?"

My piano teacher was forged from the titanium that encases the soul ( and maybe the ears) of many piano teachers. She had to teach me how to read music from scratch. All those black bobbly notes all looked remarkably similar and it was a real intellectual challenge to bend my brain. I stuck at it for two years. It was a combination of discipline and humiliation. As I winced my way through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, I was told off for "gurning". As I failed to understand some musical notation, my teacher asked me if I had Special Needs when I was in school..
It was the moment I decided that I could go it alone.

I haven't gone it alone, of course. I still practice my small repertoire and have already forgotten my scales. When I read this week how many people are taking up the piano in their later life, finding that it's truly their forte, I sigh. Part of me says, "I've learnt that ", and part of me yearns to find a piano teacher with soul, who appreciates that all I want to do is make a joyful noise. Do you really need scales to do that?
Or do I need a shield of titanium to ward off the slings and arrows of outrageous sadism?