Kelvin was sick of his mother being sick all of the time. She hadn’t been out of the hospital for more than two months in a row in over two years. He was now eight years old. The Department of Children and Families had him staying with his Aunt Maria and cousins during the week and his Grandma Faith on the week-ends. He saw his mom a lot, whenever she was home, but the tubes she had and that little bag freaked him out. He just wanted her and everything to be normal again and he was really, really mad at her for ruining everything by getting sick. Kelvin was trying to make it all go away; that’s why he pulled the tubes out that time he was visiting her.
It didn’t make it all go away.
His Carson Center Home Support Worker was trying to get Kelvin to learn new ways to notice his feelings, to name them and describe them and then, to learn new ways to be with those feelings. He needed to learn these things so that he could be safe at home with his cousins and when visiting his mom. Kelvin had come pretty far noticing his feelings, naming them and describing them. But he was overwhelmed with how else to be with his feelings of grief. His Home Support Worker started bringing Kelvin to Carson’s Therapeutic Recreation Program (“Rec”). Rec offers horseback riding, tennis, camping, canoeing, biking and many other activities. There are also piano lessons.
After watching the piano teacher introduce the piano to them at Rec, Kelvin sat on the piano bench himself, sort of scandalized that there are two hands and two scales and both going on at the same time and all the pianists everywhere seemed okay with this preposterous set up.
The first time Kelvin played a chord, just three fingers from each hand, he pressed gently and caught his breath at what he heard. For a moment, the sound of the chords soothed the constant horror he felt at his mother’s condition. There were so many things to learn that he felt completely absorbed by it. Kelvin wanted to get it right, and would sit with his Home Support Worker, occasionally saying things like, “I’ve never used my left pinkie for anything before. Now it’s got a C Sharp Extension Job”. When he put his fingers in the wrong place, it just sounded wrong, and he would move them to the right places where it sounded right. “You know, it’s such an easy way to be wrong,” he told his Home Support Worker, “It’s not going to help to make a big deal about it; I just have to change what I’m doing.” They smiled at each other, knowing the lesson was not just for the piano.
Kelvin didn’t practice so that he would get better. He declined the chance to do a recital with Rec, but he kept coming to the lessons. He played because he loved being a child in music’s great house. He loved its endless rooms, where in summer it is good to be barefoot and running through the cool stone halls and in winter there is room for him at the fire. He played because he felt that somewhere, across time, the people who wrote this music, and many who played it, knew exactly how he felt. They knew that this music was the place to say all those things that needed saying, it was the place to hear what others knew about the nature of loss and love and yet he couldn’t say them or hear them until he did his part. He took a deep breath, sat up straight, lined up his hands, and focused on the small black markings on the page.
By JAC Patrissi
