Well You Needn’t

Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up,

Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly to a point, piano teachers love to poke into the palms of junior pianists with lazy hands.

What easy villains these robotic dullards are in their floral- print teaching dresses (can those mauve blurs be peonies?).

The teachers’ plucky, make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan bloom of dust the couch exhaled when I scrunched down to wait for Mrs.

Oxley, just how we value them.

She’d launch my predecessor home and drink some lemonade, then free me from the couch.

The wisdom in Rocky Mount,

North Carolina, where Monk grew up, is that those names,

Thelonious Sphere, came later, but nobody’s sure: he made his escape by turning himself into a genius in broad daylight while nobody watched.

Just a weird little black kid one day and next thing anybody knew he was inexplicable and gone.

We don’t give lessons in that.

In fact it’s to stave off such desertions that we pay for lessons.

It works for a while.

Think of all the time we spend thinking about our kids.

It’s Mrs.

Oxley, the frump with a metronome, and Mr.

Mote, the bad teacher and secret weeper, we might think on, and everyone we pay to tend our young, opaque and truculent and terrified, not yet ready to replace us, or escape us, if that be the work.