Spring 2007
Pat’s piano teacher at Longy Music School in Cambridge, MA was a sensitive, caring woman named Deborah Beers, who taught the whole Pat. Many nights before she and Pat were to play concertos for four hands in Longy’s Pickman Concert Hall, I would ask her advice on keeping Pat calm. He was nervous that wrong notes would ruin the performance and that pieces could vary in uncontrollable ways. That’s the beauty of it, she would reassure him. He trusted her musical judgment and plunged in. Longy was a bigger venue than Pomfret Center, and the caliber of audience greater than adoring parents. She guided him expertly, letting him beg off most competitions because they brought too much pressure. He did find himself in chamber master classes and the end of semester recitals. By the end of his third year there, he had conquered his nerves and even had fun. A friend who used to play with him there wrote that they had purposely played badly at an “evaluation,” just to get a reaction. It worked, and they laughed like crazy afterward. The judges had made the mistake of taking them seriously. They obviously didn’t know Pat.
Because Debbie was such a soul mate, she waited a polite amount of time for me to send her the obituary information, and then took it upon herself to enter her own. I’m not sure why I didn’t help her. I remember my brain feeling very full and touchous about the Pat projects I undertook that spring. The thought of preparing one more obituary, which would force me to face him was too much, but then the thought of not doing it was even worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment