After a thirty year hiatus, I decided to take up the piano again. My last piano experience ended badly. Beethoven was my undoing. I was thirteen at the time, far too interested in boys and drill team to practice. When it was my turn to play at the recital, I pretty much made up “Moonlight Sonata,” on the spot, rocking and swaying like Liberaci, as my teacher flipped through the score, frantically searching for the notes I played. She finally realized I was “improvising,” and sat through the rest of the piece with a look of horror darkening her face. When I returned to my seat, my mother said, “I give up. No more piano for you.”

But I love music and I’ve always regretted not knowing how to play an instrument and not knowing how to read music. It’s sort of like going to a foreign country and not knowing the language: you know the experience would be twice as rich if you could only communicate with the locals. For years, I envied people who can sit down with a sheet of music and play, or even better, play songs from memory. Actually, I admired them, as I’ve admired all musicians. I decided years ago that I wouldn’t allow my children to make the same mistake I made. They were going to play an instrument whether they liked it or not. Quitting wasn’t an option.

So when C came to me last October saying she wanted to take piano lessons, I signed her up that same afternoon. What I didn’t expect, was that her teacher would change my life.

I took “The New Yorker,” to C’s first lesson, thinking I’d take advantage of the time and catch up on some of the articles I meant to read. But C wasn’t five minutes into her lesson before I’d folded the magazine and jammed it in my purse. Her teacher, a middle-aged Russian woman named Tatiana, started talking to C about feeling the music with her whole body. She talked about music being a conversation, a series of questions and answers. Each measure was a sentence, with color and variation. She offered a short history lesson. The language of music is Italian, as it turns out, and the way people learn to play music in the U.S. is different from the way they learn in Europe. I was hooked.
I went to each of C’s piano lessons from that day until the end of the term, and when it was time to sign up for the winter quarter, I wrote a check for the two of us.

It also helped that last summer at Ragdale I became good friends with a composer who showed me a concerto he was composing. He’d reached a point and couldn’t get any further. He was stuck. There was a place on the score worn thin from all his erasing and crossing out. I recognized it immediately and told him so. It was just like writing a chapter in the novel–all the trials and errors, the struggle to find the next right word, or in his case, the next right note. I realized then how similar our worlds were. Writing a novel and composing a concerto weren’t too different. He also gave me the great gift of leading me through a Chopin concerto score while we listened to it on his iPod. It was the same experience one would have if a writer led you through a chapter, explaining why he or she chose a particular word or phrase. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

My lessons started in January. Talk about starting from scratch. I didn’t know the difference between treble and bass clef. I couldn’t make my fingers move. It was like learning to walk. But each time I went to a lesson, Tatiana told me something that blew my mind. Our lessons are as much about music theory as they are about reading the notes. There’s so much emotion, so much color. Last week we talked about Chopin and Dostoyevsky, how they suffered in life. Did you know Dostoyevsky was set to be executed and was only spared at the very last second? He was literally on the block when the Czar stayed his execution. How’s that for a reason to write great literature? And Frederic Chopin, his relationship with George Sand? His death at 39? My God.

Life is busy. My plate is full. But I find time to practice–not every day, but most days. Funny how much richer the experience is this time around.

My next lesson starts in forty-five minutes.