Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

I Dreamed a Dream...

First the confession: I am tone deaf, tune deaf, voice poor, and have imperfect pitch. Once I tried to sing in the shower. Even the showerhead was disturbed and tried to choke me with pulsating water. Not good. I suggest, if the showerhead is on full spurt, don't open your mouth.

This lack of musical flair is not my fault, however. At the start of creation, there had to have been an unjust allocation of talents. I am totally convinced that the talent distribution was not democratic, although who can really claim that anything else was democratic then? Democracy wasn't yet invented.

On the other hand, I'm willing to shoulder some of the blame. Chances are, while they were handing out gifts and capabilities, haphazardly I assume, I must have been playing with words and probably missed on grabbing some great traits and talents.

Yet, I love music. I have given every respect to it in my so-called aficionado fashion. Starting at a very young age, too. Those who knew me as a baby used to say, even before I walked, I learned to pick up words from songs and would scream my head off, as if singing: "Love...got...gal...Khalsoo (Short for Kalamazoo). Come to think of it, my mother must have been a Glen Miller fan. By the time I turned four, I bet there were more people with migraines in our house than all the head-achy people put together in the entire neighborhood. Luckily no one got profuse bleeding from their aural cavities.

Enter the era of the piano, at my clumsy age of eight. Let me tell you, a piano is nothing to be trifled with. It possesses foxy qualities that lure a person, but then, it hammers at her self-confidence like a maniac. To top it, my teachers were a father-and-son team, educated in France, which the word France gave bragging rights to my mother while it made me approach the teachers with extreme caution and stealth.

Picture this: Teacher's studio. Metronome ticking and tocking on the piano next to Beethoven's bust, one teacher sitting next to me on the bench, the other one (usually the stricter father) with a long ruler in his hand, also keeping tempo behind me, and I, the total klutz and fraidy cat, fearing the teacher's ruler at the back of me. I am also messing up the notes, missing the tempo, and mixing up the bars inside Czerny's Method for Beginners or Hanon's Exercises. Let's not forget the large erasers on top of my two hands to teach me not to bend my wrists. I think, in that studio, I dropped more erasers on the floor in an hour of piano lesson than a bird drops doodoos in its entire lifetime.

After a few more years of this when I could faultily play a bar or two, started the advanced lessons. Teachers' comments during this era: "Don't play like a lamb; attack like a lion." "Don't be so scared. The keys won't attack you. You have to attack them." "Your left hand is falling behind your right hand." "Watch carefully. The sheet says something else; you are playing something else."

Well, I was something else, all right. I almost, single-handedly, destroyed the art of piano playing. Looking back, I probably could not internalize the fact that my piano was not a weapon of mass destruction, although it had attacked me as a weapon of mass confusion.

Finally, at the end of ten long years of lessons, one of the teachers said---I assume, out of courtesy--that I was playing the piano well "technically," but more was needed. I just didn't have that "more," and without that "more," it was mutually decided that my piano era was over. Phew!

But now, I want to make up for all that, and for the embarrassment that I still sing off-pitch, although I can recall the words to most songs perfectly. I want to make up for the tones I produced, which were so forced and horrific that even decorum didn't prevent the listeners from shrieking and running away. Yes, I truly would love a sudden windfall, a divine gift, of musical talent bestowed upon me even at this late age in life.

If not, I can still bellow, off-key, "I dreamed a dream..."

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Prompt: March 29, 2014: Tell us about a talent you'd love to have but don't.