A Mother's Patience

A Mother’s Patience
Moms are incredible. Somehow my mother has listened to twenty-two years of her own kids banging, I mean practicing, the piano in addition to many years with her other piano students. We were always so insistent that our particular little ditty needed to be played as loud and as repetitive as possible. Our own version of that song needed to be heard by everyone in the house and any possible person out walking their dog. And that to play a piece the correct and best way required a certain emphasis of the fingers, only properly manifest when the entire Steinway upright started brake dancing. Somehow she survived all this, a feat, in my opinion, entirely due to her apparent dominance at mom school. But she also has this unearthly ability to create the most beautiful music while someone much shorter than the piano banged incessantly on a single note or clambering up on her lap taking hostage the availability of several keys.
My happy infancy was spent thus, with the watering of lullabies into my dreams and whistling or humming the song my mom was learning more than she way able to find time to practice. This comprised the music that I heard, the song mom was playing, whatever I heard at church, and all the strange tunes our little hands created.
However, no place can be a music barricade. Everything is influenced. In crept the trombone and then the clarinet my brothers played. Later, I was diagnosed with percussion-random-beat-on-everything-it is, while two of my younger brothers started making some sounds that I think were suppose to be music out of these strange looking coils of metal tubes, some sophisticated persons call them trumpets and French horns. As it is now, the corner of the piano room houses these strange pursuits along with boomwackers and other hitting devices and the best instrument of all, the tambourine.
This is evidence of the music types that school band introduced into my life. We mostly played from the good old American composers and whatever song was possible for us to play and popular at the time. I remember that we once played a short piece from a Japanese composer about a festival. And occasionally when we were combined in county and regional bands we played really cool sounding music from these great musicians from all over. I really have never made much of a distinction or label for the music I experience.
Other than my mom teaching piano and band, the music of my life is brought though interactions with others who share their music with me. My dad works with several men form Middle Eastern countries who have shared some music with our family through recordings of concerts they have been to in their native land. Last year, my dad extended our musical ears by bring back songs from Hawaii.
I have not yet heard all the music I want to experience, but what I have heard has come through wonderful moments of exposure to another person’s colors in life. Quite honestly most of the music I have are the songs in my head or the lovely mixture of everyone at the family dinner table unconsciously humming some unknown tune. But I guess this is what happens when there is a piano in a home with a lot of munchkins.