Wherever you get to, there you are

My piano teacher doesn’t know that I report back on my severe lack of progress. (Example: “I presume she’s gathered I write about technology, because lately she keeps asking me about noise-cancelling headphones.”) But if she read this, she’d unquestionably be giving me a bad look for that “severe lack” phrase. I mean, I figure it’s true. However bad you can imagine I am at piano playing, I know that I am worse. I’m just okay with that because I can see that I’m better than I was when I started a few months ago. It’s like my writing: maybe the improvement is so small as to be invisible to the naked eye, but I can see it and that means the world to me. This week, though, she admonished me for some self-deprecating answer I gave about thinking chords were something you wear, and we ended up talking far past the end of the lesson. It started with how she offered that piano players need to be positive when they’re playing, but it went on into my childhood, her childhood, and the way that…