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It’s a different thing when you sing in a choir, or in a videoke bar, or jam with friends as when you make or play the music yourself. I find a diverse kind of high when I’m the one playing the instrument than just being accompanied by it. There is that control in the way you want how a piece is delivered.

My early memories of being the one playing the music, as differentiated from merely making noise, was with an old organ — so ancient — with two pedals you have to alternately step on so sound can be produced. Before I could finish a very simple tune I learned from our music class, or even an , my legs would burn. You have to pedal continuously, as gaps produced broken sounds. I was only seven then.

Prior to that, though, my older cousin, Hernes, then a piano student at the Philippine Women’s University, sought me endlessly so I could learn piano at an early age. But that was when I was only five, and what would learning piano mean when I can play marbles with the boys on the street? I might have ignored his invitations because I did not know what it really meant then. And there was no intervention from my parents to encourage me to sit and learn the piano.

I was already ten when my cousin Jaycee, whose family just moved to a town about 11 kilometers south from ours, invited me to join in the piano course her mom, Melody, was giving during weekends. We used to be living in the same town, in the same big, old house. They had to move to the next town because her parents worked there and it would be easier that all of them stayed together. With that move, the piano moved in, too.

The first time I went to their new rented house with my siblings, we toured the place first. After that, I started looking for the very purpose of my trip and there it was, so upright against the wall, the upright persona. It was painted in dark wood, shiny, and despite the appearance that it had been so used by someone else before it made its way there in that living room, it has an air of respect around it that I could not ignore. It was like a masterpiece, in its own right, just standing there.

The ebonies and ivories were long as lady fingers, solid, yet so soft to the touch. Its first user must’ve really handled it very well. I remember its sound so well; it was somber but sincere. I don’t know why it had that effect on me before and it was something I could not ignore either. It was an up-close and personal affair I had with an upright upright piano.

The lessons started. There were three of us —my other cousin Sheila, their neighbor and me— that my tita taught and we took turns on the piano stool. The first lessons, of course, were the Thompson series. Every week I was so eager to get on with the lessons and start new ones.

I had been looking forward for the weekends since. My classmates in grade school were also into their piano lessons with the nuns in the convent of the parish church in our town and during school days we’d chat on what finger lessons we were already in. My tita taught piano ala at-your-own-pace but she was ever so conscious when a note got it too short or too long when it wasn’t supposed to. What my classmates had, on the other hand, were of the stern kind. They were with the nuns!

My piano-learning days, and I really loved them all, were to be short-lived. I was the eldest, had four siblings after me and a house that had to be in order because my mom was working even during weekends, and most of the time, there were emergencies in the hospital. She was the only medical technologist for the four northernmost towns of Zambales during that time.

My last mastered piece, the one I could play without looking on a sheet, was “The Swing;” and although I had been playing other pieces beyond that, it was the one that got stuck, embedded, in my fingers’ memories.

My dad brought home a guitar one day so I could keep on with the music playing, although totally unlike piano-playing, I somehow got to learn another instrument.

As life moved on, and on some occasions, I had had brief affairs with the Baldwins, the Kawais, the Steinways, the Yamahas and the electronic Panasonics, nothing brought me to that singular affair with that Bösendorfer when I was ten years old. Well, I’m not even sure if it was a Bösendorfer; but I remember it has that harpish-looking capital B, of a European-sounding name with a character we don’t use in our regular alphabet, and was more than three syllables long. So it couldn’t be a Baldwin! Besides, I remember how my tita wanted to have it restored when we have all grown up because she said it was an original craft. So that settles it. Bösendorfer!

On the tenth anniversary of my one and only grand and continuing affair — our marriage — and my daughter was about to turn ten, my husband gifted me a piano. And that made me weep. I was transported back to that time when I was ten.

He said it was a gift for the two most important and most beautiful ladies in his life; I felt that the piano already belonged to me. It was not a Bösendorfer all right, she’s a shy Lester and she’s been keeping me sane ever since. What with all the deadlines and the deadlocks, this Lester can surely calm me down and keep my perspective in place.

So my piano-playing days came back. I rummaged around for pieces from where I left off some years ago, and even downloaded free online sheets. I started teaching my daughter what I could, and then hired someone who could teach her what I could not. That’s when Touza, a grad from the UP College of Music, came in and my daughter just enjoyed their time together. But during that time, Touza was the percussionist of the Brownman Revival band and they had numerous gigs almost everywhere. So when she could not get on her teaching schedules anymore, I had to look for another piano teacher.

In the course of my hunting, I went up to jolly old Ms. Florencio, my husband’s music teacher in grade school, to ask if she could teach my daughter. She had retired from teaching for about two years when I went to her house. She said she’s not teaching piano but her aunt does, except that she’s deaf. D-d-d-duh! But the lady was really cheerful.

Through a friend, I was able to know Norma. She’s the daughter of a musikero who was with the band that always played in the fiesta scenes for the Sampaguita Pictures before. She belongs to a family of musicians and they were born with the instruments they now professionally play; but they all had the basic background in piano. She could not come to our house during weekends, so my daughter and I went to theirs. This time, my daughter was finding the lessons, or perhaps the teacher, a bit demanding. So I sat in, so she’d feel more confident. Norma shared me theories that I practiced at home.

I can play better now, thanks to her patience. Constant practice is the key, she said. She gave me assignments to work on at home and though the process was quite taxing at the start, once you get used to it the result alone is already a huge feat. I have a lot of other pieces to work on and they’re just there waiting to be played — waiting for me to check my perspectives.

The old Bösendorfer, still in my memory. I wonder how it is now.

This so took me a lot of precious time just to change the colors of everything in MY PROFILE here. It could’ve been easier generating the page myself than going over all those titles and subtitles, wondering what part of the page it will affect. Whew!

It came out fine but I’m not satisfied for I would’ve changed a lot of things around here. Well, enough of the complaints.

Father’s Day just slipped by, so did Mother’s Day. Still wondering why a day should be named like that when everyday could be someone’s special day — depending on the effect he, she, or it has on you. And, besides, does someone else need to know about how special one is? It is too personal / intimate a thing to be sharing it with a stranger, don’t you think? And if such days are really, say, needed just to remind us of how much they mean to us, why not fill the whole year with days from the great-great grandfathers and great-great grandmothers who really (and I strongly believe this) did put up the whole clan down to the youngest member of the family and celebrate them a week apart. That is, if that is the real intention behind the mind of whoever thought of naming those days.

Wouldn’t that be truly culture-esque as everyone will take time remembering the forefathers and the foremothers. FOREMOTHERS, did the Websters or the Oxfords include such word in their list? Well, if not, they should!