Tommy and I finally got around to watching the movie Eighth Grade. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s essentially a chronicle of how painfully difficult it is to be a kid. We watch a thirteen-year-old girl navigate school and social media and the awkwardness and fear of forever being a square in world of circles. She comes alive when someone finally takes an interest in her, and she finds that friend who will listen to her and see her as a person.

Watching her, I realized that I’d found that listening ear when I was in the third grade. Her name is Sally, and she was my piano teacher.

Sally took on an essential, special position in my life. I was delighted that I didn’t have to share her with a sister or a friend for those 30 minutes on Tuesday mornings. She was all mine – her listening ears, her wit and insight, the words that came out sometimes sharper than intended. But always to the root of the issue, to my heart. There was no beating around the bush or dancing around the issue. It was just the plain, straightforward truth whether I was nine or seventeen.

“Don’t whine. It’s not godly.” 

“You need to practice the songs you don’t like, too.” 

“You’re wearing too much makeup.”

“I’m proud of you.”

“You’re something special, kid.”

Through her I grew to love music. Not just “popular” music or even “classical” music but the truth of music. The beauty of what it reveals in us and about our world. I smile now because without ever realizing it, she changed me. Week after a week, imperceptibly, but unalterably.   

Sally taught me that music is miraculous. It’s a gift. Vibrations in the air cause us to feel happy or sad or frightened or in love. Music is a metaphysical genesis, an impetus of emotion. That’s extraordinary. It seemed Sally felt God in everything, and I wanted to feel it, too. To know how something as ordinary as notes on a piano could send shivers up your arms or draw tears into your eyes.

And that was Sally’s gift to me – the freedom to feel. To find God’s gifts in the ordinary. She taught me that it’s not silly to cry while listening to Rachmaninoff. It’s not foolish to take notice of the butterfly on your windowsill or hear music in raindrops or to laugh out loud while listening to a good story. 

When I was about nine or ten, I forgot about a lesson and had to be called down from school. I arrived out of breath, no books tucked under my arm – “I’m sorry, Sally! I thought you were on holiday!”

She laughed so hard she cried. She told that story for years because she was so delighted by a child saying on holiday. 

I knew I would never have the skill and natural affinity that other students possessed. Sally knew it, too, and in her usual blunt manner she told me so. “Elizabeth, you’re not my best student, but you love it the most.”

And I did. Because whether it was Mozart or Chopin, it made me feel something. The music I learned with Sally became the soundtrack of my teenage years. An escape, a focus, a gift that filled the lonely spaces of my young life. 

Sometimes I would appear on Tuesday mornings unprepared and distracted, angry at a friend, nervous about a basketball game, or anxious about cancer and the future it was creating. On those weeks, we didn’t always have a piano lesson. Sometimes we would cry, and we would talk. Because I wasn’t created for piano lessons. The piano was created for me.

The day my dad died, I didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t stand to be in the house, so I went to Sally’s. She gave me a Cherry Coke, and we sat on her front porch swing while the sun set and the train went by, whistling in the distance. When night fell, as softly as a final breath, we made a bed on the living room floor, and I fell asleep listening to her play on her baby grand piano – Schumann’s Traumerei and Debussy’s Clair de Lune. 

And in the morning, I could face it. 

It’s been nearly a decade since our last lesson together, but I experience the legacy of her gift every day of my life. As long as music goes on, so do Sally’s words. Shaping, correcting, loving me. Wherever Liebestraum is played, I think of her. 

When adults take the time to invest in the little people coming behind us, we demonstrate how to really live. Not the virtual, through-a-glass or screen version of life, but the messy, physical, vibrant version of life. 

Sometimes I wonder what I would have become without a Sally. I wonder what kids everywhere are becoming without adults who are willing to be vulnerable with them. Because at the root of it, vulnerable adults are simply revealing their inner child. Demonstrating that inner joy and wonder don’t have to fade with age and reality. 

The beauty is always there. In the music. In these simple gifts.