Piano high

I read somewhere that one must do one thing a day that scares you.

I'm afraid I took this advice to heart a couple years ago.

It had been a lifelong dream to learn the piano and so I started lessons with my at the time 7 year old son. Piano is perhaps one of the most difficult things I have ever taken on. And that's an understatement.

And my over forty year old hands are not thanking me for doing so. If I don't practice everyday, I lose skills like water draining from a pot with a hole. Granted the Suzuki method has some finger twisters but my performance (especially compared to my more nimble fingered son) isn't much to write home about.

But I long for the day I can jam effortlessly playing the odd jazz piece or just play my own thing. It's been two years and that goal seems as far away as another habitable planet in the universe. My hands move along the keyboard scrawny and splayed like vulture talons. And the sound I end up making isn't awful but a gifted student, I am not.

Between trying to remember (Suzuki relies on memorization) notes for the left hand and the ones for the right hand and  correct fingering, I usually forget the finer points such as dynamics (softening a place, making a note or chord sound louder), Then there are greater goals I am being encouraged to achieve--soften the left hand compared to the right hand (keep dreaming) or in a chord, emphasize the top note (my fingers laugh when my teacher says this to me).

And so I stumble along lesson after lesson. But I persist. Why?

Piano high. Like runner's high, after most lessons (unless I have done super badly in one), I leave full of sauce to practice and perfect something that week. The sauce runs out of steam by the end of the week and filled with anxiety I attend class. Seriously, I get nervous before every single lesson. Which is why I asked my teacher not to make me play in performances.

I mean, imagine the embarrassment. When I ascend the stage following some gifted five or nine year old, the audience will see me and expect some major movement or adagio. Instead I shall give them chopstick fingers. How appalling. And between feeling nervous and facing an unknown piano (this one really does it for me. I can somehow manage on our house piano but this is one instrument you cannot shlep along with you so heaven knows what you will have to play on. Which keys might be gummy, which loud, which soft. The tension would literally fry my brain.)

And so I stay away from that side of things.

It's not encouraging being the only oldie amongst a group of ranging from 4-17 year old students. Most of them Chinese and for some, the piano being a second instrument. Let's not even go there. I mean where is the time for these kids to practice, let alone get as good as they are?

Anyway, thanks to piano high I shall persist and who knows by the time my teacher is 102 and I am in my sixties, I shall have my debut piano concert! Don't laugh. I've heard of many a piano teacher live that long.

As for me, what can I say? I'm a late bloomer.

Taking stock

These days I spend time trying frantically to market my book.

I know I am trying to prove something. That I am capable of this, showing that my drop of a book can glisten and rise to the top just as well as another in this vast ocean of media bombardment of all sorts? Or that I am smart? That I can make it a best seller by using sheer elbow grease? I have no name, no marketing millions to back me up. Just my street smarts (such as they are).

Seems like a futile exercise.

Makes me wonder. Does it matter if 500 more people read my book? Ten more libraries buy a copy?

I don't need the money. I am not in this for any sort of renown.

What then? I question why I even bothered writing it?

But then when I see my son insist on giving a copy to his teacher I feel a glimmer of understanding as to why it might all be worth it. This pride he feels will stay inside him in some shape or form, be formative, perhaps. A nice memory of his mother. Something he will pass on to his daughters and sons.  That feeling has meaning.

I read a very nice thought on a library website (as I was trying to contact them to pitch my book). Can't find it anymore but it said something like 'artists want their work to live on forever....and yet we always stop and admire butterflies.' I've done an awful job paraphrasing but the idea is, I suppose, that the simplest things are what remain most meaningful.

It is amazing how ambition can be blinding.

At first I was thrilled when a few libraries (major ones) agreed to buy my book.

Then my local library bought a copy. It was all I had ever wanted. To know that a copy of a book I wrote would be in my local library.

That was it. Should be enough.

And yet that slime of wanting more creeps in as more comes in. Lots of parables to cite on this one.

And the result is more anxiety, more stress. I took pleasure in that achievement for exactly five minutes. It was something I have wanted for years. How pathetic.

I don't know that I have the sauce in me to write another book and go through the wringer again. I am not that good a writer.

I have to believe what I say to people. That publishing a book and getting it in my local library was a bucket list item that I have finally checked off. A decade later than I had planned. But it has happened.

Then I think, should I now go on to another item on the bucket list? Is it even worth having such a list? Unless it is not one of ambition but of more accessible goals.

Perhaps I ought to learn from this, one of my favorite cartoons.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

• November 03, 2013
• From Beginning
• Previous feature
• 
• Next feature
• Current

Kirkus Review for The Colossus

KIRKUS REVIEW

In Iyer’s debut thriller, a young Chicago caterer finds herself in a race to unlock a mysterious code that will reveal the secrets of her deceased father’s life’s work.

This complicated adventure tale begins in 1935 at an archaeological dig in India’s Indus Valley, and it moves through modern-day England, Pakistan, and Germany as its characters go on a madcap search for clues. At the Indus dig, Maxine Rosen’s grandfather, Samuel, discovered an ancient stash of small disks made of some sort of nutritional supplement. Local legend said that they could bestow either long life or unsavory death, depending upon who swallowed them. To study them further, Samuel brought the disks back with him to German, where he was head chemist at Berliner Pharmaceuticals. Years later, his research was taken up by his son, Hiram, in Chicago; he died in 1995, an apparent suicide. Now, in 2000, there are powerful people who want the disks and findings destroyed, and they’re targeting the few remaining people who know about the Rosens’ work. When Lars Lindstrom, Samuel’s old lab assistant, shows up at Maxine’s door and asks for her help in deciphering Hiram’s code, she feels compelled to complete what her father and grandfather began. Iyer maintains the narrative tension throughout; each discovery leads to another riddle and adds to a growing cast of threatening bad guys, including former Nazis. She’s rather good at subtly dropping clues that many readers will likely overlook—just as the inexperienced heroine does. The author provides romantic relief in the form of Dr. Julian McIntosh, an archaeology professor at the University of Chicago who agrees to help Maxine in her quest, but unfortunately, he’s thinly drawn. In fact, except for Maxine, the novel pays scant attention to character development, concentrating instead on the main storyline. Interestingly, Iyer is at her best in lengthy passages that detail the disks’ components: complex, ancient spores comprised of retroviruses that somehow lower one’s metabolism. This intriguing biochemical aside offers implications that ultimately validate this thriller.

An often imaginative novel with a well-concealed surprise ending.