The Carpool

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My mom was all about the carpool. So it should have been of no surprise when I signed up for piano lessons, that mom, instead of driving me the five minutes back and forth one afternoon a week to piano lessons would find another kid in town taking lessons. She would then call their mom and institute a weekly carpool. I get that she saved her precious time and gas, but there were some by-products which she may or may not have thought of. My partner at the lessons was nice enough, but she also bought into the piano lesson regime way more than I. She subscribed to practicing her scales, keeping up with the songs that she was working on each week and getting ready for recital. So my mom would drop us off and hit the gas, and we would saunter into the house.

My friend went first so I would spread out my homework on the kitchen table while trying not to listen while she ran through her scales and started in on her elaborate pieces all to the backdrop of great compliments from the piano teacher. Also each week, the piano teacher would write notes in our notebooks and, if we were good, we might get an ink stamp on the page. I only remember two of those. Meanwhile my friend not only had a collection of well-deserved stamps, but the piano teacher started rewarding her work ethic with small statues of famous composers like Bach and Beethoven, so she would frequently leave the lesson clutching a new statuette. I never got one and still covet them to this day. I suppose I did not deserve one as I would not practice, and the only piano playing I recall at home was playing chopsticks with my brothers’ friends. At the spring recital I played “Three Blind Mice” while my friend played a piece by Handel. At the end of the recital, the piano teacher had concocted the horrible idea that my partner and I should play a duet. What an awful way to point out my lack of practicing against my friends mastery of the 88 keys. My parents did not look elated when the recital was over and did not make me sign up for another year of lessons. I was happy about that. And the only thing I was going to miss about those weekly lessons was the time I spent observing the action at my teacher’s bird feeder.

When my friend was having her lesson, I was supposed to be working on my homework in the kitchen. The piano teacher’s husband was usually around in his Clark Kent glasses. A quirky guy and a real jokester, I didn’t find his jokes all that funny, so I took to distracting him by pointing out the action at the bird feeder. We could count on the tufted titmouse with his small crest and bright black eyes. He would go back and forth between the feeder and a sapling. We liked his industrious habit of collecting a seed and taking it away to eat and then coming back and doing it all over again. Later, I was to learn that titmice are cavity nesters and depend on dead trees in which to make their homes. And if that is not cool enough, they can be hoarders and stash a stockpile of seeds, already shelled, in a convenient location. Clearly the tufted titmouse was way more interesting to me than listening to the banter from the lesson in the next room and realizing I was up next.

Photo by Joan Heffernan
A tufted titmouse firmly clasps a black oil sunflower seed before flying off to a nearby tree to crack it open.

So these days when the titmouse comes to my feeder I think of those days plinking along on the piano when what I really wanted to do was watch birds. And the folks I put on a pedestal are not the famous composers. They are Roger Tory Peterson and David Sibley, avid birders and authors of my field guides. Birding is something I am happy to practice, and I don’t need a rubber stamp or a statue to encourage me. Just give me a window and a tufted titmouse, and I am happy.

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