The last lesson

Well, yesterday was my last piano lesson. (Hopefully, just for the summer: based on what she said, it sounds like it's maybe 70% certain she will be able to teach in the fall. It comes down to whether she will still be working in the local school district. I'll know in July; I really  hope it's a "yes.")

I was apprehensive about the lesson. Not apprehensive because it was the last one, not because I wanted to play REALLY EXTRA WELL seeing as it was the last one. But apprehensive because I didn't want to cry.

That's kind of sad and stupid, but I realized afterward perhaps part of my distaste for engaging in public displays of emotion (standard disclaimer: no judgement on people who DO, I get that some people do that) for myself, is that I was one of those little kids who cried SUPER easily:

- when I got threatened with detention in grade school for talking with a friend in class
- getting a grade less than I thought I had earned on a project
- being told by a classmate that, yes, I didn't get an invitation to her party because I wasn't invited even though every other girl in the class was
- someone looked at me funny
- someone called me a mean name
- the class got kept in at recess because someone else acted up

It got to the point where some of the meaner kids would TRY to make me cry, it was like a sport.

And I feel like, I guess, I've outgrown that, so I go in the OPPOSITE extreme and try really hard to be the Big Tough Cowgirl and never show an excess of emotion. (I don't always succeed; sometimes I run out of cope and just can't do it. I think the last time was last spring when the problem student finally got to me and I just broke down in my chair's office. However, I will say, to my credit, she told me I was the faculty member who lasted the longest before coming to her angry/upset/frustrated over the students' behavior).

Oh, I do cry when it's appropriate - if I didn't cry when people died, I'd have a cold butt for a heart. But I've forced myself, sometimes by biting the inside of my lip, sometimes by readjusting my hair, sometimes by forcing myself to think of something TOTALLY different ("quick! What's the recipe for chili that you use all the time?") not to cry when I feel like it's not necessary.

But anyway. I managed not to cry even though it was hard to see all the artwork and stuff gone off the walls. (She had a "timeline of music" that went from (I think it was) Michael Praetorius up to L. L. Cool J. I remember that because I remember being surprised to learn that L. L. Cool J is a year older than I am - I always pictured him as being younger).

I almost started at the end of the lesson, when she patted me on the shoulder, and told me I had come a really long way in the roughly four years I'd been taking lessons, and told me to keep practicing the scales and to just select pieces I wanted to play out of the books I had and to work on those over the summer. And that I still needed to relax my hands more, that I got too tense when I was playing.

It's going to be strange not having that focus for the week, the weekly lesson. I was thinking I needed to get a little calendar or something to write down my practice time each day. (My teacher would give us logbooks where she could write down what she wanted us to work on, and there was a space for us to record how long we practiced each day. I suppose that was more aimed at the younger students who needed prodding, but....writing down my practice time kind of became a habit and I'm almost a little afraid that without the feeling of the "need" to practice I will slack off and won't continue to progress.)

It's funny, I do have a little bit of that old "end of the school year" feeling like I used to get when I actually was in grade school - that last week of school when the bulletin boards were cleared off and you cleaned out your locker and your desk, and the school building already felt a little melancholy and empty. (I liked school. Maybe kids who didn't felt differently. But school gave me a sense of purpose and even if I didn't really fit in with a lot of the kids, the teachers liked me....)