The Music Inside Is the Same

Paul* had signed up for piano lessons earlier in the year as a complete beginner, hoping for a creative outlet that might balance his academic work. He had progressed fairly quickly at first and showed quite a bit of potential but became increasingly distracted and had less and less time to practice. I had agreed reluctantly to be an itinerant teacher and come to his apartment, only because he pleaded that he couldn’t come to my studio for lessons and leave his two young children on their own. 

One week, he did not answer my knock at the door, so I headed back down the hallway to the stairs. Suddenly Paul burst through the stairwell door dressed in full, flamboyant drag, pulling off his wig as he approached. We both stopped and exclaimed, “Oh!” at the same time. I said, “I was just leaving. It looks like it’s not a good time for your lesson.” He was most apologetic about having forgotten and said he had just come from the big city three hours away, adding unnecessarily that he had a lot going on and would have to stop taking lessons. I knew he did indeed have a lot going on, between the children and his doctoral program to finish in the spring. Now, he said, he also was in transition to become “Paulina.” His ex-wife didn’t know yet. He hadn’t planned to tell me this soon.

I heard later that Paulina had graduated with a PhD and moved away. Wherever she ended up, I hoped the digital piano had come along too, and that circumstances worked out for piano lessons to be an option again. Whether Paul or Paulina, there is music inside, and it only needs a chance to come out.

*Name changed.


 
Willow in June, Millhaven Creek 

Smashed on the rocks near the old mill and basket factory lies a white ceramic plate with black script that would have spiraled to the center from the outer edge. It seems poetic somehow, the general sense of the words I see while walking past and trying to resist the urge to gather the fragments and make sense of them, as well as the fact of the plate having been thrown with force onto the ground. Someone’s dignity, stolen by anger or despair.

But my destination is the willow tree beside the creek with the wide cascade of rapids no more than half a meter high, so I keep walking. There seems always to be a willow near an old mill. The composer Rachmaninoff took care to plant willows at his secluded summer estate but only enjoyed them for seven years until 1917, when the place burned during the revolution and he fled by sleigh over the border into Finland. His dignity—and that of the willows—stolen by war.

Willows grow quickly, anywhere from two to ten feet a year. The trade-off is that they only live for 20 to 30 years, but one can propagate more trees by taking “switches” from an old tree in the spring, placing them in water, then planting the rooted cuttings in the fall. One of the blessings of willows is that other species of trees can sometimes emerge from a fallen willow. Thus the life cycle continues, as does the dignity of the gentle elder.