Reading about your children's musical talents, which you were writing about elsewhere, I thought you might enjoy Ammo's tale. (Your fault- you are always so encouraging about my stories)
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We took pride in our sensitivity toward our children’s needs and talents, taking every opportunity to nurture their interests. We never wanted to hear the words,” If only Mom and Dad had given me zither lessons, I wouldn’t have wound up on this street corner.”
We saw great gifts in everything our children did; how can it be that Ammo's flair for the dramatic slid under our radar?
When Ammo was six, he decided he wanted to play the drums. Now the drums, in my elitist opinion, are a musical step below the zither, and a long elevator fall below the piano, so it is to my credit that we rushed to Toys R Us that Christmas for the 99.00 special and found a teenager to teach him the rudiments for 7.00 an hour. These lessons lasted about two months with no noticeable development of either rhythm or technique and then just petered out. No one remembers quitting-- the lessons just faded away,and the drum set went in a garage sale.
I record this meaningless story only to show what good parents we were and to add a little clever literary foreshadowing to this rather shallow work.
This was the same year that he started piano lessons with CW’s teacher, Mr. O’Neill. Ammo never seemed to actually take lessons, although he was dropped off at Mr. O’Neill’s house on a weekly basis. This was one of Ammo’s greatest abilities and we failed to appreciate it: he could disappear; he was the David Copperfield of first grade. Starting with the disastrous gymnastic event, he continued to disappear through the years. If he thought people were going to look at him, he made himself impassive, and thus, invisible. He hid behind and under and in things to avoid being looked at, as if the mere glance of another human would cause him to shrivel up and die, like Dracula in the rays of the sun.
Can we truly be blamed for failing to realize he was born to act?
An example: I was giving piano lessons that year and decided that Ammo and CW should perform at the recital with my students. CW would willingly have played the entire Alfred’s Piano Course for anyone who would listen. Ammo refused to play. In fact, he quit piano as soon as I informed them that they would be in the recital, in an
attempt to avoid having to play in front of people.
“You can quit lessons, but you’re still playing,” I said. “I’ll teach you the recital piece myself.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, puzzled. After all, our living room wasn’t exactly Carnegie Hall.
“I don’t like people looking at me,” he said.
I should highlight that sentence.
Unfortunately for Ammo, I didn’t have that many students and really needed him and CW to play to make the recital last longer than ten minutes. Using candy and threats of bodily harm, I forced him to play Barnyard Hoedown in front of a dozen parents. Had he not been a somewhat lazy child, he would have run away from home.
He was wonderful, note perfect, never had Barnyard Hoedown been played with such exquisite sensitivity. And he never touched the piano again until his teen years, when he began composing incredible scores on the keyboard and his friends would say to me, “Wow, where did Ammo learn to play the piano like that?”
I have no idea, but I like to think he extrapolated it from the brilliant teaching he received from his mother learning Barnyard Hoedown. |
