Piano Lessons

Every day for 1 hour, between 11.00AM to 2.00PM... the sound of fingers striking on piano keys sifts through our apartment corridor. I believe there is a little girl that stays on the same same floor as us. She must be a very diligent scholar of music as I never fail to hear her practicing every day. But we have never seen her before.

I am quite certain that this musician must be a little girl because of the sometimes erratic way she practices... sometimes fooling around with her scales a bit and sometimes rushing through the pieces with a slight tinge of impatience... which reminds me very much of myself during my piano practicing days.

I wonder if her mother nags her to practice like mine did. I wonder if she dreads playing the same repitition of majorm minor and chromatic scales and appergios. I wonder if she gets bored of painstakingly working through a long piece by Bach or Brahm, note by note and bar by bar... never realising how beautiful it all sounds until weeks later after so much hard work, it all finally comes together as music.

I used to sometimes dread going to piano lessons. They seemed to be such an inconvenience at that time. I'd rather be playing with my brothers or reading a book, than sitting in a cold cubicle, being criticised by my teacher for missing this or that little detail. She was actually a very nice teacher, and I did like her and admire her very much all the same.

I wonder what made me stick through piano lessons as long as I did. My brothers had long given it up along the way. I must have pleaded and begged my mom to let me stop many times. But somehow I never did give up.

In the end, when I was old enough to understand, I realised what a gift and privilege it was to be able to learn to play a musical instrument as this.