A Pilgrim’s Digression

A few weeks ago, Brendan began piano lessons with a college student who teaches piano for extra cash. I am not sure yet that he is going to stick with it; for one thing, he says he does not like it. For another, we don’t have a piano in the home, so with no instrument to practice on he is not going to advance very quickly, if at all.

I’m inclined to let him drop it for now, and maybe take up another instrument when he is a little older. We have a violin that belonged to my maternal great grandfather. I’d like Brendan to learn how to play that, eventually.

But for now, we have been experimenting with piano lessons. Last Monday, I took him for his second lesson, after school.

His piano teacher’s name is Martha, and she is a college student, approximately twenty-two or three years old. Her apartment is not your typical college pad, however, probably because the college she attends is very expensive: $35,000.00 a year. Her apartment is bright and roomy, so new-looking you can almost smell the fresh paint and brand new carpet. In the living room, an enormous picture window looks out over the river and allows plenty of light into the room. While waiting for Brendan to finish his lesson, I sit on her leather sectional sofa and look at the large, blank, flat HDTV.

The TV sits on a modern-looking, IKEA entertainment table where her Sony home theatre and X-Box 360 also sit in perfect, small little cubbies. The controllers are neatly placed on top of the X-Box, the front of each one facing the other, their cords carefully concealed behind the machine.  Another cubby holds six or seven DVD movies nad Xbox games.  I cannot read the titles of the games from where I sit, but I can read the DVD titles: “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Troy,” “Meet the Fockers”…all fairly typical, light film fodder.  I was hoping to see something like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a film that might give an indication of a wild and rich intellectual life.

Everything in the apartment seems almost too neat and buttoned-down, and Martha herself is pretty and neat in that young, blond, college student sort of way. She wears her hair in a pony tail, and her face is lightly coated with acne that she powders over with makeup, though I do not think it mars her appearance, really. Around the house, she seems to wear clothes other people would wear to work, always giving me the impression that when we arrive, she has just come home from her “real” job. No sweatshirts and jeans for her.

I wonder if she is Mormon. There are three schools in our immediate vicinity, one of which is a Mormon college. She does not go to school at that particular school, but we see a lot of Utah license plates in our town, despite being so far east. And Martha just has that indescribable, too-good Mormon air about her.

You see them just like her out on the streets on Sundays, groups of three or four clean white kids, usually two boys and two girls going door to door, dressed up in their Sunday best.

When you answer the door and tell them you are not interested, they smile so pleasantly as they say goodbye and god bless. They don’t pressure you at all. Not like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are usually quite pushy, to say the least. I always wonder what their smiles connote. What are they thinking behind their smiles and their plain white blouses and plain white dress shirts and dark ties? Are they thinking, “That’s fine. You have a good time in Hell, now. Ya hear?”

So I sit on her couch and wonder if she is Mormon, and wonder if her Dad pays for all her nice stuff, as well as her rent and college tuition. On this particular day, however, there is a little girl, about six years old, who is there for lessons when we arrive. The girl’s mother is there, too, sitting on the couch where I usually sit, reading a Nora Roberts novel. Briefly, I envy her; I don’t even consider bringing a book to situations like this anymore, though at one time I would have been sure to have reading material handy.

The little girl is just finishing up. She and Brendan have a conversation while her mother and the piano instructor chit-chat.

I listen to the kids instead of the adults.

“What’s your name?” The little girl asks. “Mine is Tiffany.”

“My name is Brendan.”

“My brother is named Brandon, too.”

“No, Brendan,” Brendan says.

“Yeah, I know. Brandon.”

“No, Brendan with an ‘e,’ Bren-dan,” he says emphatically.

I have this brief moment of reverse deja-vu where I envision him having this same conversation with almost everyone he meets for the rest of his life. I hope he doesn’t think too badly of us for the name we chose.

“Oh,” Tiffany says. “I’ve got a mole on my belly, wanna see it?”

“Yeah,” Brendan says, excited.

I cringe a little as she hikes up her shirt, wondering if I should stop her. Her mother is too busy gabbing with Martha.

“See?” Tiffany says.

“Yeah, can I touch it?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“No, Brendan,” I say, “You don’t ask little girls things like that.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Well…”

“It’s OK,” Tiffany says. “He can touch it. Wanna touch my belly button too?”

“Yeah!”" Brendan says, excited. “Oooh, it sticks out.”

“Yeah, I know.”

After letting him examine and poke her mole and her belly button, she puts her shirt down. Then she says, “I’ve got a birth mark, too. Wanna see that?”

“No,” I say.

“Yes!” Brendan says.

Fortunately, the birth mark turns out to be on her arm, a small, almost scar-like pink line about a half-inch long on her forearm.

“I wish I had a birthmark,” Brendan says. “It looks like a snake.”

“Do you come here for piano lessons every Monday?” Tiffany asks.

“Yes,” Brendan says, which is not exactly true. Monday was a make-up day because I forgot to take him on the previous Friday.

“Well, if you come early every Monday, you can come take your lesson with me. We’ll be friends.”

“OK,” Brendan said, pleased.

At about this point, Tiffany’s mother finished nattering with the instructor and told her daughter it was time to go. She gave Brendan a hug, which I think surprised and pleased him a little, and she and her mother left.

The remainder of the lesson was uneventful. I sat on the leather couch and looked at the blank TV, sometimes dozing, sometimes getting up to look out the window at the wonderful view of the river.

A half hour later, Martha and Brendan come out of the back room where she keeps her piano. She tells me the lessons he should practice during the week; she just assumes we have a piano. I feel like an idiot for not correcting her; I feel like an idiot for buying him piano lessons when we do not have a piano in the home.

“He’s having a little trouble remembering which hand is his right and which is his left,” Martha says.

“He is left-handed,” I say, “I think he gets confused by ‘right hand’ and ‘write hand.’ He thinks the hand he writes with is his right hand.”

Martha looks at me as if I am a dolt.

“Well, he needs to work on that. Maybe you could just remind him when he is practicing.”

“Sure,” I say.

Later, in the car, Brendan says, “Now Dad, next week we have to come a half-hour early so I can take my piano lesson with that girl.”

“Okay,” I say. “What was her name again?”

I had genuinely forgotten.

“I don’t remember. She let me touch her mole.”

“Yeah,” I said.

And then smiling to myself, I said, “You touch their mole and can’t even remember their name afterwards.”

“I think her name was Tiffany,” he said.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said.