A woman's son

My relationship with the piano has been, at best, casual. I remember when I was a kid, taking the bus and going to take piano lessons, for which my mother paid. I was fulfilling a dream my mother had. I always notice how happy she is when I play, as if an old sentiment has suddenly brought the smell and taste of a day many years ago when she was a small girl and yearned to be a pianist. She sat down, then seven years old, and opened the lid of the black upright piano in the house she grew up on, and a white smile drew before her. She extended her arms and played the highest and lowest note, softly with the left hand, strongly with the right hand. And she put before her a sheet of music, that had in it notes that moved like a trail of ants on severe parallel lines. She then didn't know how to interpret what the notes were and why some were held together and some separated but she did know, because she had heard, that music was born from those symbols. Certainly she was by now (or then) convinced that a wonderful meditation would be wrought of the weaving of notes and that like this, the piano will forever appease her. But one day, shortly after she learned her first Mozart, a pain jolted from her wrists and punctured a nerve that would handicap the index and thumb of her right hand. Surgery was needed and years later a scar remains as a mark of a broken heart, and since life did not permit her to learn how to play the piano, I became my mother's hands. A magnificent melancholy fills her eyes. And i see her and I notice that time has scratched her face and has eroded her hands. And she smiles sweetly as I promise a Sonata by Mozart. She listens.

And as i play I think: It is lovely to be the son of this woman.