Zibby Mag

By Linda Broder

My son is playing the piano and music is everywhere. Like water, it slips out of the room and flows into every corner of the house. My fingers itch to reach over his shoulder and play him that tricky section, but Zack is seventeen and doesn’t want my help. He plays for hours, struggling with those same few notes.

He stopped playing four years ago. I know the exact day, that last Tuesday in August. Four years, three months, and two days ago. For years, he wouldn’t even walk into the living room or glance at the piano. Now that he’s playing again, I don’t want to do anything that makes him run. I stay in the kitchen and slice an apple, timing each cut with the rhythm of his song.

When I was little, my piano teacher used a wax apple at my first lesson. She molded my fingers around its shape, curving my hands into the perfect piano position. My fingers memorized its contour. Decades later, even at rest, there’s an apple-shaped space beneath my palms.

I use apples for my piano students now. When Zack was born, I imagined giving him his own apple. Even as a baby, he felt the music. When he was two, he cried in his crib, overcome by a sad song. “Too much,” he said. “It hurts my heart.”

When he was three, his teacher carried him out of the room when the music teacher played her guitar. The chords strummed through him. He was terrified of the vibrations he felt inside.

“Maybe he doesn’t like music,” my husband said, but I knew the opposite was true. He hummed the melodies I played on the piano and tapped rhythms on the table, his legs, even his father’s head. He’d hear the whine of a truck and match that pitch with his voice. Music had crawled inside him. He felt its power and pain; he just needed to find a way to let the music out.

The morning of his fourth birthday, Zack raced down the basement steps into my studio. He ran to the wall of paper apples fluttering in the breeze, one for each student. He found his name and grinned when I gave him a sticker for chanting the seven letters of the music alphabet. “There’s no H in music,” he sang. “Only A through G.” His older brother Brendan had taught him that.

I helped Zack wriggle onto the piano bench and handed him apples made from foam. “Keep your hand relaxed,” I said as I molded his fingers.

Even as a baby, Zack felt the music. When he was two, he cried in his crib, overcome by a sad song. “Too much,” he said. “It hurts my heart.”

He squeezed the apples tight, laughing when he crushed them. He hopped off the bench and juggled them in the air. Three times I tried to shape his hand, but he squirmed away. I gave up, and we spent the lesson pounding rhythms on the giant floor drum, his hand clenched in a tight fist. I tried moving his fingers open, to find that space beneath his palm, but he wouldn’t let me. He banged the drumbeat he felt inside him until it became a wall of sound filling the room.

For months, we didn’t play songs on the piano. Instead, I surrounded him with music. He floated red and yellow scarves in the air while I played long lines of music. He bounced balls to the beat of elephants marching into a circus tent. He climbed on top of a mini-trampoline and soared to the notes flying above him. He started knocking rhythms on the black keys, his arms loose and floppy just like mine.

I knew he was ready when I played a song in a minor key. He felt the sadness and slowed down, but he didn’t stop moving. He was no longer afraid, the music no longer trapped within him. It poured from his body — from his arms, his elbows, his feet.

We started playing songs on the piano, simple melodies that he copied with ease. Minor songs filled with sorrow no longer bothered him. At five he played his first Halloween song. “I can do spooky sounds now,” he said as he played diminished chords up and down the keyboard.

When he was eight he felt the music so much he could see it inside his mind. He didn’t need to look at the notes. He pulled his shirt up over his head and played Pachelbel’s Canon with his eyes covered.

“You’re peeking,” Brendan said. Zack shook his head and made me cover his eyes with my hands to prove he didn’t need to see to make music. Feeling it was enough.

Zack stopped playing the piano twenty-seven days before his thirteenth birthday. So many of my students stopped in their teen years as they were pulled in many different directions. Brendan himself had stopped when he was fourteen. But it wasn’t baseball practice or video games that made Zack quit. He stopped playing piano because on that last Tuesday in August, his brother died in an accident.

I didn’t notice the silence during those first few months. But once I did, it seemed to scream all around me. I tried to get him to play again. Music was my bridge, my way to move through grief. But not for Zack. Sadness filled him; there wasn’t enough space for the ache of music. He stopped coming to the piano, stopped humming a melody. He played the saxophone at school as if following a formula. He held himself tight and never let the music move him.

I yearned to hear him play, but I knew he needed time. He threw himself into basketball and baseball. He jumped on the trampoline until his breath grew ragged and then ran upstairs into his room, his head turned away from the piano.

I didn’t notice the silence during those first few months. But once I did, it seemed to scream all around me.

But I didn’t give up. I filled the house with music, playing songs I knew he’d want to learn. I left sheets of music scattered across the piano, like breadcrumbs leading him home. I gave him space and waited for the music to swell inside him again.

It was more than two years before he started tapping rhythms on his leg. A few months later, he started humming melodies at the dinner table. One day, he walked by the piano and picked out a few notes. I stood frozen on the stairs, waiting to hear more, but he closed the lid. I said nothing as he passed me on the stairs, his hands clenched in a fist.

It was seven more days before he entered the room again. He sat down and played Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. He’d remembered it from years before when the words meant something different to him. It was filled with mistakes and he kept starting all over again, but he didn’t stop playing. I stayed in the kitchen and dug my fingernails into my palms so I wouldn’t rush into the room.

I finish my apple and stand by the French doors of the piano room. He plays every day now. He likes me watching him, listening to his music, as long as I say nothing. I’ve learned to stay silent. Sometimes, he lets me turn the pages. He closes his eyes, his head tilted. His hands sink into the keys, playing those dark chords he once feared. He plays with a sensitivity he didn’t have before. He knows when to lean in and how to make long, lyrical lines drip from his fingers. He no longer bangs out a wall of sound, but hunts for the space between the notes, the ones that make all the other notes pulse with meaning.

I’ve taught him so much, but he’s the one that’s learned to make the ache inside him sing. He knows when to make the music laugh and when to make the notes sound like stars glittering across the sky.

He’s no longer afraid to make the music cry.

His fingers fumble. He looks up at me and shrugs. “I don’t have that section yet.”

I don’t offer to help.“Do you want to play a duet?” I ask.

He nods and I slide onto the bench next to him. Our hands are reflected in the shine of the piano. His are bigger than mine, but shaped exactly the same, with that curved space I helped carve bit by bit. We play Pachelbel’s Canon, a different version of the one he used to play with his shirt pulled over his head.

We lean in, listening for balance, taking turns bringing out the melody. Our hands move in harmony. The song ends on a gentle sigh and our wrists float in the air, still holding onto that space. For a moment, a small moment, we hold our breath and savor the silence.

I want to reach for his hand and hold onto him. But, he’s seventeen. Instead, I smile and let him walk away.

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Linda Broder is a writer and teacher of creative mindfulness. She offers tools and inspiration at https://www.lindabroder.com/hope.