Not Bearded in Heaven
July 1st, 2009
Uncategorized, music
She has long fingers, blunt and graceful as nudibranches – sometimes in my head, just as many. When she plays, her fingers, white as the sun, plays. They bounce over phrasings with a flourish and she rolls the wrist laguidly over the keys – as if taking a merry stroll in a park. She has long slim hands that she keeps very smooth and white as the sun, although I have never once seen her put any lotion on her hands. Intermittently, she would wipe the keys using the piece of cloth kept at the side of the piano, for the perspiration, she explains.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
All of us hold our hands the way she does, with varying success. Only one other person succeeded changing her hands to an exact copy. She was an older student and while taking the teacher’s diploma, she taught the younger students. She looks like a conventional pianist: pale and slim with tidily permed hair. In other words, she looks like my piano teacher.
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
It was with difficulty that I found a fuzzy video of her accompanying her husband on the piano. I didn’t know it was her until her hands bounced and then I’m fourteen again, in the carpeted music room, feeling woefully inadequate, wanting to be elsewhere.
