From Rita Rubin, author of “Music Lessons” in Brevity 28:
“Music Lessons” was an exercise for a graduate class in creative nonfiction. I’m one of a small minority of students in my writing program who are parents, and I frequently look to my daughters for inspiration. This time, my muse was my older daughter, Hannah, whose most recent piano recital had left her dejected. She had played her piece perfectly many times at home, but, in front of an audience of strangers, she lost her place three-quarters of the way through. For a heart-stopping second or two, she froze, her fingers spread above the keyboard, waiting for her brain to tell them what to do next. She finally finished the piece, took a bow, and returned to her seat in the audience.
Despite reassurances from her parents and her piano teacher that hardly anyone had noticed her slight slip-up, Hannah kept her head down for the rest of the recital, as though hiding her face could make her whole body invisible. My original plan was to write about how helpless I felt as I watched my child experience the most embarrassing moment of her young life and how sad I felt when I realized that I could no longer fully protect her from hurt. But Hannah’s experience got me to thinking about some of my own less-than-stellar recital performances and my own piano teacher, and I ended up setting aside my original plan for another day.
