Heart music

This afternoon I was goofing around with the GarageBand software on my computer at work, and when I opened the loop editor and clicked a random piano loop I had a sudden, very sweet stab of adrenalin that shot all the way through me. The piano sounded so beautiful I felt like I was on fire! And I felt something else: a desperate longing to play music again.

Listening to someone else play a piano is nothing like playing it yourself.

I took piano lessons for probably about eight years as a child. For the first year I walked to my lessons at an elderly neighbor lady's house, where I would climb up onto her big brown padded piano bench and sit with my feet barely reaching the pedals, playing scales and repeating songs like "The Lion Hunt" over and over and over until we were both happy with my performance.

After that I started studying at the university with a friend of our family who was the director of the music department there. My favorite memories of those lessons are of wandering around the empty, musty-smelling music building. Listening to unseen students playing various uncoordinated instruments in locked practice rooms. Spying on abandoned saxophones and cellos waiting patiently in empty offices. Breathing in the smells of old wooden furniture and dampness and stale cigarette smoke. Sitting hunched down in deep cushiony chairs in someone's studio or in the giant empty auditorium, writing in my notebook. Pulling myself along by the smooth wooden handrail as I climbed the stairs from the basement to the third floor. Standing on my toes to look out the tall arched windows at a snowy parking lot at twilight, or at new leaves in spring, or at the lights of cars curving around the corner from the institute building, watching to see if it was my mom or dad coming for me. I remember the sound of hard-soled shoes echoing down a long, white tiled hallway in the dark.

I remember falling in love with certain pieces of classical music around this time, too. Chopin, Mozart, Beethovan. Easy pieces kids could learn. I remember listening to my father play Moonlight Sonata from memory.

I remember the wonderful feeling in my hands when they really knew the instrument, and music would just come pouring out of them. It was so easy, so natural.

When I was a kid I had lots of experiences that were very physically satisfying in that way. I remember running fast, jumping, swimming, playing music, doing gymnastics, playing games – the feeling that comes when your body knows what to do and takes over doing it, and your mind empties itself and you forget you even exist, for awhile. These days I am so used to ignoring myself when I want to move and play like that, that I hardly ever even notice it anymore. I've forced myself for almost 20 years to sit still in a chair for eight or more hours every day.

Riding the bike has been a little taste of what I've been missing. Maybe that's what's opening me up to the idea of doing more now, finally – playing the piano again, or finding a place to swim more often. It's exhausting to live so wrapped up in my own mind so much of the time.