Emotional today

The last painting Timmy was working on when he died. His classmates put the finishing touches on it, and signed it. A treasured possession...

This morning one of my FB friends wrote about encouraging children to learn to play an instrument. Joy was a music teacher at St. Johns and is now touring periodically with my neighbor, Donna, doing lyceums in State of Florida schools, using music to teach history. 

Anyway, Joy used a quote from Dr. Suzuki that encouraged parents to get their kids into music, how their minds will be aided by learning an instrument, and so on. I could not help but remember Timmy, at 4 1/2 years old, taking his piano lessons at the Suzuki Studio, with Tatiana as his teacher. Oh my, that was brutal! 

He liked making faces at himself in the shiny black piano and kicking his feet against the piano while seated on the bench. In fact, at one point, she fired him, saying, "You don't come back here!" in her Eastern European accent.
                                                
The owner of the place disagreed and said he could come back, but it didn't go well. "I play it the way I want it!" I told Joy this story and she said, "I wasn't his teacher", meaning she would have been able to harness his free-spiritedness. We will always wonder, won't we?

He did learn a little song to play using "the black set keys", as Tatiana called them. He would start on the left end and walk his fingers up the black keys singing, "Mommy, I love you", all the way to the other end. My favorite song of all time....