I’m listening to Ben Folds play piano behind William Shatner. It is a beautiful and sad song, a letter from a father trying to reunite with this estranged daughter. Folds plays a gorgeous, rolling piano part, easy for listening, no doubt complicated to play, all to bring the listener to four counts of silence, punctuated by three words, sung mono-tone: “that’s me trying.” I wish I could write like that.
I wish I could play like that. I took piano lessons for four years and hated most of it. I gave not a rip about scales and fingerings and songs by dead white guys, most of whom have been rotting for at least several centuries. I suspected that they gave not a rip for me, either, especially given the effort I put forth and the quality, or lack thereof, with which I played their songs. Bruce Hornsby would have been fun, but I never got there. Still, basketball across the street with my friends probably would have won out there, too.
Every day I would come home from school and practice, thirty minutes of sheer torture. Well, more like 27. I fudged it. And it wasn’t quite every day, either. I, to this day, maintain that time slowed down for the half-hour of practice, and then, to make up for the difference, accelerated during my allotted half-hour of Nintendo.
The last year of lessons was hell on staves. When I was much younger, my mother had the foresight to purchase a trumpet on a garage sale for all of $25. It was a good horn, and ended up getting six straight years of use, first me, and then my sister. Mom may very well have saved herself anywhere from $300 to $1000 with that purchase, which was an amazing investment, especially considering the fact that she greatly reducing risk of embarrassment from a piccolo playing son. Oh, I’m sure my parents would have still supported me; they just would have made me practice with a cork in the end of the flute.
But trumpet and piano at the same time was too much to bear. I simply could not sacrifice an hour, an entire HOUR of daylight with things so trivial as sharps and flats. I’m sure by the 6th grade, I had (mostly) given up the dream of playing in the NBA, but I still wanted to make the “A/B” basketball team instead of the dreaded “C.” Neither the NBA nor the A/B panned out, but Mom let me quit piano after one year of two instruments.
(An aside, for you small-town Iowegans: the ‘letter’ system is how the separate the talented kids from kids that are, well, me. This happens when you have 600 people in your graduating class. I realize that there were more people in my 5th grade class than in your entire hometown, so I felt the need to clarify. “A” or “B” meant you got a sweet jersey and got to play competitive ball. “C” meant you were on one of the 6 terrible teams from your school and had to split bench time with the kids who weren’t coordinated enough to walk and the kids who were ball hogs, but couldn’t remember which basket they were supposed to shoot at.)
I quit piano and was never happier. Except for the 24 minutes a day that I was still practicing trumpet. A couple of years later, I picked up my dads acoustic guitar, and then, a few months after that, bought my first electric, using money that I had saved up from bagging groceries at Hy-Vee. At $4.25 an hour, that is a lot of cans of beans to be bagged, but my parents insisted that I buy the instrument myself. I am certain that they were convinced that electric guitars and rock and roll were, much like The Foosball, the devil, or at least a path pointed firmly in that direction.
Therefore, I took no guitar lessons. I had no desire to. I taught myself, something that would have no doubt been impossible if not for the years of torture, I mean piano lessons. And, because of that, I probably played for well over an hour every day. Ironic, at least in the world of Alanis Morissette. I loved guitar, and still do.
But, man, I wish I could play piano. It’s such a trove of possibilities, a treasure chest of sonic delights. Alas, I can only play a little. I have again been relegated to the “C” team; all other keys are disastrous.
Why do I want to play the piano so badly? I have varying degrees of competence on many instruments. I can, on occasion, write a catchy song. And, in all humility and objectiveness, I’m a pretty good guitar player. Yes, I am infuriated whenever I find someone better than me, but the fact remains that I am pretty good. Yet I wish that I could play piano. What is wrong with this picture?
I think Mick Jagger said it best: “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Someone else came close, too: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
