Is This the Real Life?

Is This Just Fantasy?

She looks up at the sheet music, then down at the piano, then up again - moves her fingers a bit, looks down. This goes on for a couple minutes. When she finally begins to play it’s, well, not good. “Ooof,” she says. She tries again and again, a couple more times. Same result.

“Yeah, I can’t do this,” she says.

“You can’t do it, yet,” I say.

We’re in the music store waiting for her violin to be restrung. She had run over to the piano music wall and the clerk let her sit and fiddle on a beautiful Roland digital piano.

The song she selected to play, the one she tried and tried but was unable?

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

She points to some lines and squiggles on the sheet. “I don’t even know what those are,” she says. “How can I play it if I don’t know what it is.”

“You just haven’t learned it yet, that’s all,” I tell her. “What song are you currently practicing in your lessons.”

She tears off an angry version of Pop Goes the Weasel. I’d never heard that song played angerly and it’s pretty funny.

“You can’t go from Pop Goes the Weasel to Bohemian Rhapsody, kid-o. Nobody can.”

She makes a sound that sounds like a hurumph. It’s a good lesson in pace and levels of difficulty - a way for her to really be aware of the gap between where she is and where she wants to be. The only way to cross that chasm is hard work.

Her violin is ready. “Want me to buy the piano book for you?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

But at the counter she see a delicate violin holiday ornament, turns it over in her hands.

“Give it here,” I say. She smiles. I can’t give her Carnegie Hall level musicianship, but I can buy her a Christmas tree ornament. That’ll do for now.