Maybe I Do

Dear Friends, Photo by Veronica McGinley This third paid-tier preview picks up on a theme I’ve written about in a number of issues of Four By Four ( #6 , #19 , and #28 ): the role music has played in my life. I’ve told parts of this story before, but I’ve never put it together in quite this way, framed by my friend Ronny’s belief in my talent and its potential. More to the point, I don’t think I would have found this perspective if I hadn’t decided to write about it as part of this month’s preview. Thank you for letting me share it with you. I wish you all a happy, healthy, meaningful and fulfilling holiday season. -Richard 1. Exposition Those are my hands over the keys at the grand piano that stood in the parlor of the dorm I lived in when I attended Edinburgh University in the summer of 1985. I’d dropped out of the graduate creative writing program I was attending earlier that year, and since I had no idea what I wanted to do next, my friend Ronny persuaded me to go with her to Edinburgh to study Scottish literature for a couple of months. I was a pretty good self-taught piano player by then, but I was less interested in performing for an audience than in the music I made when I sat alone and played only for myself. The presence of that piano, therefore-I did not have one at home-made me very happy, since I could play it in the moments of solitude I often sought out while my friends and classmates were out doing other things. Ronny took the picture of my hands late one afternoon when she happened to walk in on me while I was playing. She did not say anything to interrupt me, just crouched low enough to get the angle she wanted, snapped, and left. 2. Development I say I was self-taught, but that’s not entirely true. I started playing piano when my grandmother showed me how to play the C major scale on the upright Steinway that stood in the dining room of hers and my grandfather’s apartment. She also gave me my first lesson in how to read music: whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes, in four-four time. Some years ago, my mother found the original sales receipt for that piano among my grandmother’s papers. I didn’t know this back then, but my grandmother once had ambitions to sing opera and had, in fact, sung professionally on the radio when she was younger. (If I remember the story I’ve heard correctly, a young Jimmy Durante was one of her accompanists.) While she encouraged my interest in music, however, and in the piano, my grandmother actively discouraged me from taking music seriously, even once it became clear that I had a talent worth developing. I’d taken piano as a spring elective during my senior year in high school and had just played in the...

Preview: ~500 words