The Smell of Success

So after the feast and some goofy play time with my fam over the Thanksgiving holiday, I got to enjoy some quiet alone time later in the weekend. Everyone was gone doing this or that and I found myself staring at the family piano, wondering when on earth I had last played. Months? Years? It was sort of tragic considering that when I was in high school, I came home every day and banged on that piano. And with all of my moving around the past few years, I had lost my two favorite piano books somewhere along the way. Or so I thought.

Even though I had rummaged through my mother’s piles of music a hundred times in search of my beloved books, I gave it one more shot and suddenly, there they were, staring at me from inside the piano bench! One was from high school, the same John Thompson book that my two older sisters had also learned from. Tattered pages, binding shot, cover completely absent, notes from our piano teacher scrawled in three different colors of ink for each of us...it was perfect.

I couldn’t believe how giddy I felt upon recovering this music. I mean, I actually squealed. And then I sat down and played. Beethoven. Bach. Mozart. And my Chopin! It wasn’t pretty. Oh God, it wasn’t. But to pound out Beethoven’s first movement of Sonata Pathetique (okay, maybe not quite all of that first page, I never did completely master that one), to feel my fingers run through Bach's sonatina, I felt overwhelmingly happy. And I was amazed how after a few goes at each song, I was almost back at my standard level. Like riding a bike....

There’s something to be said for feeling a sense of productivity. I’m quite certain this is why cooking and baking became a more serious hobby for me in recent years. As a social worker, I rarely saw the results of my hard work. I certainly hoped that my actions were leading to the long-term safety of a child or the formation of a new family unit but how was I really to know? But I certainly knew that if I threw flour, eggs, butter, and sugar together, something delicious would come of it. And there’s something pretty spectacular about mastering a goal like getting all the timing of Etude in E Minor right. I'm not quite there yet but it's coming. I can smell it. Sort of like that cake in the oven.

Ahhh, success.