Piano Lessons

When Gareth Evans was a boy in Cardiff, there was an old piano in his grandmother's front room. Every Sunday after lunch, she would sit down at it and play hymns while the rest of the family argued about rugby. Gareth would stand beside her and watch her hands moving across the keys. He begged his parents to let him have lessons, but money was tight, and in the end they bought him a bicycle instead. He never stopped regretting it.

For the next fifty years, life kept getting in the way. He trained as an electrician, got married, raised two daughters and spent thirty years fixing other people's wiring. Whenever he heard a piano on the radio, he would turn up the volume and promise himself that one day he would learn. But there was always a reason to wait: the children, the mortgage, the job, his back.

Then, a month after his sixtieth birthday, his daughter Rhian came round with a present. It was a voucher for ten piano lessons. "No more excuses, Dad," she said. Gareth tried to explain that he was far too old, that his fingers were too stiff, that people his age didn't start learning new instruments. Rhian simply refused to listen.

His teacher was called Yaima Castillo. She was twenty-seven, had grown up in Havana and had studied at the music conservatory there before moving to Wales to do a master's degree. Gareth expected someone strict and serious. Instead, on the first day, she asked him to tell her about the music he loved. When he mentioned his grandmother's hymns, she sat down and played one from memory, and then a Cuban song that sounded almost the same. Gareth laughed for the first time in weeks.

But Yaima was not interested in letting him skip the hard parts. She made him practice scales for fifteen minutes every day, slowly, with both hands. Gareth hated scales. They were boring, they were difficult, and he could not see the point of them. He would practice them grudgingly, muttering under his breath, before moving on to the simple tunes he actually wanted to play.

His biggest problem, however, was not his fingers. It was his fear of making mistakes. Every time he played a wrong note, he would stop, apologize and start again from the beginning. One afternoon, after he had stopped for the fifth time in two minutes, Yaima put her hand gently on the piano lid. "Gareth," she said, "stop apologizing. Mistakes are not a crime. If you play a wrong note, keep going. Music is not about being perfect. It is about not stopping."

She told him that when she was a child in Havana, her teacher would make her play pieces all the way to the end, whatever happened, while the neighbors listened from their balconies. "I used to make a hundred mistakes," she said. "Nobody remembered them. They remembered the song." Gareth thought about that all week.

Slowly, things began to change. He stopped stopping. When he played a wrong note, he would frown, but he kept going. The scales became easier, then almost pleasant, like a morning walk. His wife started bringing her tea into the room to listen. After six months, he managed to play his grandmother's favorite hymn all the way through, with only three mistakes, and none of them made him stop.

At Christmas, Yaima organized a small concert for her students in a church hall. Most of the performers were under twelve. Gareth was the last to play, and his hands were shaking so badly that he almost walked out. Then he saw Rhian in the second row, holding up her phone to film him, and his two little grandchildren sitting beside her. He sat down, took a deep breath and began.

He made four mistakes. He did not stop once. When he finished, the children in the audience clapped louder than anyone. Afterwards, his granddaughter asked if he would teach her to play. Gareth said he was still learning himself, but that they could practice scales together. She asked what scales were. He told her she would find out.