A Puzzling Adventure

I always believed that I would be a great do-er of jigsaw puzzles.  It started when I was just a wee child.  I would work on my wooden puzzle that depicted a mother hippopotamus and her baby and involved, oh, maybe about seven pieces.  I worked feverishly numerous times reuniting that mother hippo and her baby, putting them back in order as if their very lives depended on it.  Then I graduated to the 25, and even 50 piece puzzles of furry kittens and sleepy puppies.  I was good at them.  Efficient.  I delighted in them.

So I always imagined that one day I would join my mother at her grown-up puzzles depicting the English countryside that were comprised of 1,000 or more tiny pieces.  However, when the time came for me to leave behind my childhood puzzles and join the world of adult jigsaw puzzles I found myself, well, disillusioned.  We would lay the puzzle out, flip the pieces over dividing the border pieces from the rest of the riff-raff, and with great anticipation start putting the pieces together.  But I found that sitting in front of seemingly millions of disconnected puzzle pieces that frankly, resembled nothing of the scene on the puzzle box when blown up to a larger size and chopped up like raw hamburger, was not relaxing or fun - but rather frustrating and futile.  I did not enjoy it.  I found it to be a giant waste of time that turned my brain to mush, made my neck hurt, and made we want to sweep the entire puzzle to the floor with a giant wave of my angry arm.  I was, in short, a great disappointment to myself. 

I gave up my puzzling ways.  I would stare in wonderment at my mother and sister who worked tirelessly at assembling these puzzles that were a staple in our house during the winter.  I envied them and their enjoyment.  Sometimes I would give it a go again to see if maybe something in my brain had clicked and I would now find this a pleasant past-time.  But nothing ever changed.  I would work for what seemed like hours to find two pieces that fit together and exhausted from the exertion, I would declare myself done. 

When I married Brian I discovered that he too was one of these odd breeds of people that enjoyed the process of piecing together a perfectly lovely picture that had been torn all to heck.  (Who ever came up with this sick idea?)  It is an endless source of amusement to me to see him drawn to puzzles that are laid out in people's homes.  An intensity enters his eyes and he slavishly labors over the puzzle, almost unable to pull himself away from it.  (One of the funniest things he's ever said to me was, "man, my back hurts from working on that puzzle."  Seriously!?) His child-like joy at working that puzzle is amazing and endearing.  I have to admit, he seems to be good at it. 

We've tried laying out puzzles here in the past because I know he enjoys them.  However, until recently our cats have always made that an even more frustrating and futile activity than what it already is.  (As in, we would wake up in the morning to find puzzle pieces all over the floor.)  But they are old, lazy, and fat and no longer express interest in...well, anything really.  So we are once again in the safe zone.  So this weekend, we purchased a puzzle at a thrift store and got to work. 

And - low and behold, I enjoyed working on that puzzle all weekend.  Is it that finally at the age of 33 I have enough patience and wisdom to find pleasure in the puzzle?  Or am I just bored and stir-crazy enough from winter that any task, regardless of how horrible it is, will appeal to me?  It also could be the fact that Brian and I made it a competitive sport.  I wanted to be better at it than him.  I became territorial.  (Don't you dare work on that turquoise dinghy!  That is mine!  And don't even think about touching the barn either.  I'm going to work on it!)  I trash talked.  (Yeah, I totally put together that sky border before you got your border pieces together.  And mine was WAY harder.)  I threw pieces into the area he was working on.  I blocked his light with my head.  I threw my elbow around.  I declared him arrogant.  At one point he said he might not be able to work on the puzzle with me anymore because I wasn't a good sport.  Whatever Mister High-and-Mighty.  Sheesh. 

Basically, it was a good time.  And I want to do it again.  And I feel so grown up and proud of myself now that I enjoy puzzles.  I feel like I have "arrived." 

And I also feel fairly geriatric, because at the age of 33, our wild and crazy weekend entailed putting on our pajamas, turning on some classic rock, and working on a jigsaw puzzle.  Well, call me old or lame if you will.  It was still a thoroughly relaxing and lovely weekend.

That Thing I Do

Every time I lose a piano student it feels like a punch in the gut.  It hurts.  I mourn and grieve.  I question my teaching abilities.  I wonder if there is more I could have done.  I feel like a total loser.

I go through this even when I sense it coming (because I can often feel it heading down the pike).  I experience the grief even when I know that the time is right for a student to quit and that it will be best for the student and myself.  I even mourn a little when it is a student that I never really "clicked" with or one that never did any work (making lesson time torture for both of us more than likely). 

So when, at the beginning of the week, I received a call from a mother of two students to inform me that they would be discontinuing lessons at the end of February (for reasons I totally understood), I found myself facing that familiar mixture of disappointment and regret again. 

I rarely talk about piano lessons in this blog.  Not because there isn't a wealth of material - because WOW! - there is a lot of good stuff there.  Not only are my students hilarious, but I continually learn so much through them.  But somehow it feels as though there is some unspoken teacher/student confidentiality vow that I have taken.  I don't ever want a student to feel as though they are the butt of a joke or are being violated in any way.  And I guess what happens at our lessons feels a bit private and maybe even a little sacred to me.

I have the privilege of meeting one-on-one with children and young adults once a week.  And some of these students I see once a week for six or more years!  We build a relationship, a trust that I take very seriously.  Some students open up to me at the first lesson but some relationships I have to coax and nurture and build.  I made a decision long ago that regardless of a student's performance at the piano, I was going to build a relationship with the person who comes to lessons each week. 

Because each student is a person:

• who is good at some things and not as good at others,
• who has passions and hobbies - even if it's not piano,
• who experiences angst and drama at school and occasionally gets their feelings hurt,
• who has tests to study for and lines to memorize for the school play,
• who has a beloved pet that just died,
• who is excited about a sleepover or cousins coming to visit,
• who has dreams of someday becoming something great. 

How narrow it is to only view them through the lens of the piano.  If I only viewed them through that lens I could potentially end up really disliking a student who is a delightful person.  So I try.  I try to get to know them all and value them for who they are.  Sometimes I fail and I never quite make that connection.  (And granted, I only have a few minutes a week which isn't super conducive to developing really deep feelings.)  Sometimes I am just not the right teacher for a particular student.  But I really hope that they can feel that I care.  I think they do.  I have even had a few students break down in tears when they told me they were going to quit.  Which then makes me cry and really, it's a big mess. 

Perhaps that is why it always hurts when it's time to say goodbye.  Maybe if I took a more clinical approach, more professional even, I could separate myself from the heartache.  I don't know if I want to.  I don't know if I would enjoy what I do as much without the richness of those relationships. 

And then, with perfect timing, a new student came to meet me at the end of this week.  One that will leave me eventually as they all do - but one that I think I will love working with.  I was reminded that there is a constant cycle to this job of mine, and the sting from earlier in the week lessened.