Even though it is.

Home Is Where the Bach Is

You can tell a lot about a family by the very first thing you see when you walk in their front door. Maybe it’s a photo of their dog. Maybe it’s an overflowing coat closet with muddy boots poking through the doors.

When you walk into my house, the first thing you see is my mother’s Steinway concert grand piano. My mom once had a full-ride scholarship to Juilliard. She even played in Carnegie Hall. Then she got nerve damage in her left hand.

It took her a long time, she told me, to find a new dream, but she realized that, like in music, you can say silent, special things to people with cakes and cookies. I’m not exactly sure what she means, because how can you say things to people without actually, you know, saying them? Anyway, she discovered that an only half-useful left hand doesn’t hold you back as much in a kitchen as it does on a piano keyboard. She’s even figured out how to manage most of the cake decorating with only her right hand, and she has an assistant at her bakery who helps, too.

She still likes to play piano sometimes, but she gets frustrated when her left hand won’t do what she wants it to. She especially loves to play when my big sister, Nonny, is here. Mom can play the right hand if Nonny can do the left.

Both Mom and Nonny won a piano contest called the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when they were twelve. When they were my age.

I always wanted to win the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when I was twelve.

I wanted to be Mom’s left hand, too.

But here’s the thing about music and me.

There’s something that happens to my muscles when I look at piano music. It starts in my shoulders, then spreads down my arms and to my gut. My shoulders become stiff and hard to move, and my hands get cold, and I suddenly have to pee really bad.

Sometimes people talk about deer in headlights like it’s a cliché, but I read about it once in a magazine, and it’s very scientific. Adrenaline floods their body and literally makes their muscles freeze even though a big old truck’s about to blam right into them. I think maybe when my brain looks at piano music, it turns into a stupid, frightened baby deer that only sees an oncoming big-rig.

I really tried. For three years I took piano lessons, complete with frozen-brain practicing sessions and one especially jaw-clenching recital that totally flopped. So when I was ten I finally quit.

Afterward, when I wasn’t turned to stone on the piano bench anymore, I sometimes talked to Beethoven and Bach in my head, asking them why they had to make it so hard for people like me. Sometimes it felt like they looked down at me in their white wigs, pointed their fingers, and laughed.