It had to take my father dying for me to finally decide to be serious about learning the piano. I’ve been wanting to play the piano for 40 years. I’m 43 now. He died five months ago.
ABOUT LOSING MY DAD
A week before he got sick of Covid-19, he had internet service installed. He was finally starting to learn the internet. And I was looking forward to teaching him.
He had been so averse to the idea of learning about anything to do online. He felt it was too complicated for him. He wanted us, his children, to email stuff for him, search something online, book for a trip. I would get frustrated with him because for me, these things were so easy.
I was the one who gave him his first smartphone. He had fun with it playing Candy Crush. He got so good, I had to ask him to get me out of a level I had been trying to beat for months. He reached the levels to the thousands but would get frustrated when he didn’t know how to update the game so he could get to more levels. He would need me to update it for him. And there were times when I won’t return the device to him for weeks. (Not good on my part, I know. I regret it fully now.) If he knew how to update the game himself, he would have reached further up into it before he died.
The pandemic came and he got really bored staying at home. This then started to make him interested in using his data plan to watch YouTube. I had set up a Facebook account for him so that we could use it to update his games. He discovered that too. And he would read everything that showed up in his feed. Finally learning about the net opened up a whole new world for him.
When he realized he was exceeding his usage (and it cost a lot!), that was when he decided to finally get a wifi connection at home. After trying to convince him for years, he was finally open to the idea of learning about the Worldwide Web.
Barely a week after he had the service installed, he got really sick. He couldn’t even stand, let alone bring himself to go to the hospital. He had this strange cough that won’t go away for weeks but he ignored it. It got so severe that it finally compromised his lungs. In 2020 and beyond, if you’re brought to the hospital for a check-up, it was mandatory for you to get tested for the virus.
While waiting to be tested, my father urinated in his pants. I’m sure it was due to him not being able to stand up on his own to go to the toilet. He was never incontinent. In fact, just days before this happened, he even drove me to work.
My mother called me to say that we were bringing my father back to the hospital because this time he asked to do so and that he would like to be confined. I didn’t go to work that day.
We were lucky to get a bed because most hospitals had been turning away patients.
My father was twice my size and taller. When my youngest sister (who was even shorter than me) and I were supporting him to get into the car, I could feel him shaking and doing his best to not put too much of his weight on us.
When we got to the hospital, we had to wait for hours before he was let in because of paperwork protocol and all that. On a wheelchair this time. We weren’t allowed inside.
A day later, we found out it was indeed Covid-19 and we were terrified.
It took 15 days. Then on that late night of September 25th 2020, I was fatherless. He was only 68 years old.
HOW I STARTED WITH MY “MUSICAL JOURNEY”
I had been wanting to play the piano since I was 3 years old. My grandmother gave me this beautiful wooden toy piano. I just played with that thing for ages until the wooden keys started to fall off. It was also a time when classical music was played regularly on the radio. I was exposed to it so young and my absolute favorite was (and still is) Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube”.
Over the years, the reasons for not studying are many. We don’t have a piano. Lessons are too expensive. And for the most part, my family isn’t musical.
When I turned 7, my father gave me my first electric toy keyboard. I loved that thing to death.. Within days of having it, I had learned all the songs in the songbook and would play them over and over again. Unfortunately, the toy was flimsy and it didn’t last long but my love for the piano just intensified.
The next few years came several more variations of the toy piano but never really an actual piano. I would only get near one if we visited my cousin’s house. I envied them that piano and they didn’t seem to care about it very much.
When I was 10, my father brought my sisters and me to this park gathering. I forgot what they were called. It was prevalent during the 80s. It was a group of big companies that would provide a lot of kid activities all in one place. Participation was all free and we got to play games and win prizes.. It was a way for these companies to advertise their products and services.
One of these companies was giving free organ lessons. It wasn’t the piano but it was close. And on this day, I learned my very first song on a real instrument, “The Elephant Song”. I can still play it to this day. The company was YAMAHA.
Seeing how good I was playing that song with two hands (Yay!), with just a half hour of lessons, my father signed me up for the program right away. A week later, I was officially a student of Yamaha’s Electone School for Children.
The same teacher who gave lessons on that park gathering that day also became my music teacher for six years. She told my parents that I was her best student she ever had and I have carried that honor for years with pride.
Months later, my father bought me my first real musical instrument, a Yamaha FE-30, which took him a year to pay for.
I stopped when I entered college. My beautiful instrument was stored but then got destroyed by flood and rats. What’s left of it is my bench, which I’m now using with my current digital piano.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF MY STORY?
Over the next several years, from my late teens to my forties, that desire to learn the piano won’t go away. Many failed attempts have occurred over the years partnered with a number of excuses, whether valid or not.
Trivial as it may seem, my father’s decision to finally learn how to navigate the internet came way too late. I don’t want to die, not able to do what I wanted to do for the longest time. Play the piano.