When I was a child, my mother made me take piano lessons. I perceived that to be the gravest injustice ever perpetrated by a parent upon a child and used every shred of willpower I could muster to make myself perfectly immune to the education.
I can’t rightly recall how many years I spent at it – more than five, less than ten I suppose – but I do remember going through no less than half a dozen tutors, and it would take me just over a year to exasperate each one into surrender. Each screaming resignation, each tuft of hair yanked out in fury, each tear shed in quiet misery by an instructor felt like a badge of honour to the little terror that was yours truly.
Who needed the piano? Certainly not Guns ‘n’ Roses! Certainly not Nirvana, Metallica or Pearl Jam! No sir, all they needed was long hair and a guitar; and while growing the hair was a rather effortless task, learning the guitar was an altogether different story.
Like it or not, I was a natural on the piano. Despite my most sincere efforts to the contrary, before I walked away from the keyboard for the last time, I could play a mean Für Elise, a half-decent Moonlight Sonata and was just getting the hang of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor Op. 23. But after two years of bashing at the guitar – playing it till my fingers bled, as the saying goes – the only identifiable tune I could muster was a Happy Birthday; another two years and I could almost bash out a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Musical fame wasn’t exactly forthcoming, to be sure.
And the longer it took me, the more the guitar went out of fashion. By my mid-twenties, on that glorious evening when I finally managed a full song – Nothing Else Matters, in case you needed to know – I looked up at my imaginary audience and realized that they’d all left the building; the age of guitars, rock ‘n’ roll and all that good grungy stuff had long passed me by. I neither had the hair to grow nor the inclination to grow it anymore; and I was far too fat to fit into all that jeans and leather nonsense from my university days – heavens, who’d want to wear that anyway?
It wasn’t cool to play the guitar anymore, it wasn’t impressive. Hundreds of guys around me were doing it all the time, and at levels of mastery that I couldn’t possibly fathom.
Snap forward to 2012, Abu Dhabi, and my wife and I are sitting on our balcony and enjoying the evening breeze. Inside, Moonlight Sonata is playing, and I’m thinking how that tune could squeeze a tear out of a rock, should it find a slightly depressed rock within range. I mention that to my wife.
“I love it as well,” she responds. “I always thought I’d end up marrying a guy who could play some Beethoven.”
And just like that, my mother’s crackling laughter flashed into my head, with the world’s largest ‘I told you so’ closely on its tail. It took a while – just over three decades to be precise – but I now realize that a man should always, always listen to his mother. We’re also investing in a piano this year.
