REMEMBERING WHEN: Piano lessons and the cat

By Keith Schell

One afternoon in late September, just after I had bought my house in the city in the early 1990s, I had a quiet day off in the middle of the week and was relaxing in my living room with the back patio door open when the neighbourhood kids started coming home from school.

Because our backyards adjoined each other, I could hear the little girl in the house behind me coming into her backyard as she said goodbye to her friends. She came around to the back of her home and went in through the open back patio door into the house.  

After announcing she was there to her Mother and whomever else happened to be at home, there was a moment of quiet in the backyards between the two houses.

And then, the silence between the two houses was broken by the sound of a piano being played.

The little girl in the other house was taking piano lessons. 

After practising her scales, I heard her tentatively start to play the simple children’s tunes that every child plays when learning how to play the piano.

I quietly closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair, listening to the little girl as she practiced her children’s tunes: ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’ and so forth.

And I smiled.  

It took me back to the summer of my own youth when I wanted to learn how to play the piano.

When we were young, we had an old white-painted upright piano in the far corner of our living room that took up space and was almost never used. Sometimes, we kids would fool around on it and pick at it a bit, playing ‘Chopsticks’ and other similar kid stuff that required no musical talent whatsoever.

But one year, I decided I actually wanted to learn how to play our piano.

To my recollection, it was the summer in between my last year of public school and my first year of High School; I don’t remember what possessed me to take piano lessons, but for some reason I wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument. I was probably self-indulging in a rock and roll fantasy and thought it would make me cool like a rock and roll star (And of course, it never did.)

When I asked my parents about learning the piano, they were fine with it and gave me the money for the lessons. Wanting their children to have every advantage, I don’t ever recall any reasonable request we kids made being refused. (As a kid, I never really fully appreciated my parents’ generosity and support until I was old enough to understand it all from an adult perspective.) 

We already knew someone who gave piano lessons by the hour. He and his wife were the leaders of our little country Church, and he was one of the local public school music teachers. So we made arrangements with him to give me lessons over the summer after school let out.

When the summer lessons began, Dad would drop me off on the appointed day at the house in town where the weekly lessons were being held. After running his errands, Dad would come back and pick me up again at the end of the hour.

The lessons commenced, and I began the journey over that summer to become the next Glenn Gould. 

While learning the basics, the teacher gave me a lesson book and advised me to practice for an hour every day. I would do scales and play simple children’s tunes at home, progressing over the summer to more intermediate tunes as my playing improved.  

While the rest of the family merely tolerated my daily practicing over the course of that summer, one family member in particular who really seemed to enjoy my piano playing was the family cat.

With typical feline curiosity, every afternoon when I started practicing, our cat would walk over and sit on the floor by the piano.  After intently watching me for a minute or so, she would then hop up on the keyboard and walk up and down the piano keys while I was trying to practice, much to the amusement of the rest of the family.

And when she did that, playing her own little random tune as she wandered up and down the ivories, I would gently pick the cat up and put her back down on the floor, softly scolding her with a smile as I did. 

Sometimes, she would walk away after I put her back down on the floor, but more often than not, when I resumed playing, she would hop back up on the keyboard and walk up and down the keys again!

Many a day over the course of that summer, I had to squeeze in my piano practice in between interruptions by the family cat. Sometimes, we actually had to put the cat outside for a little while so I could practice uninterrupted. I smile about the memory now.  

I read somewhere a long time ago that cats like music and actually have an ear for it. And that was certainly the case with our cat. I always thought our cat liked my piano playing but maybe, in hindsight, she was just walking up and down the keys with the intent to actually prevent me from practicing! We will never know.

As a piano player, I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad. I finally lost interest in the piano in the fall when school let back in, and I stopped taking lessons. It was just not my thing.

But I will always be grateful to my parents for letting me find out on my own that I was never going to be the next great piano player in musical history, even though our cat thought I was.