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The Sound of Joy Through My Son’s Ears
Why it’s good to live vicariously through another person’s eyes sometimes
It’s a Monday and I’m inside an air conditioned building sitting on an IKEA Poang chair while my son is having his weekly piano lesson. Usually there are other parents sitting nearby waiting for their own kids, but today it’s just me. I walk toward his room, Studio 4, where he’s sitting on the piano bench next to his teacher, a twenty-something music college graduate who typically dons a baseball cap. I smile and wave; he does the same. Then I walk away, feeling proud that we have gotten this far. And we have so much more to go.
James has been playing piano for the past six months — as in, real lessons — but his interest in music has been present much sooner than that. Aside from stuffed animals and books, James isn’t much of a tactile playing kind of kid. He doesn’t care about trucks or baseballs or video games. What he cares about is music — specifically, the piano. This is evident by the fact that the only toy he’s ever truly played with — and the only one he still has in his room — is a toy piano we gave him for his third birthday. I noticed this sometime last year and told my husband as much. He agreed that our son seems to be into music a lot. James even took the initiative to learn piano on Duolingo (yes, did you know that…
