In Memory of a Teacher and Friend

(Tuesday, Dec. 2) This is not related to Liberia, but to my family back home. I am missing a funeral today, back in Lynden, WA, for my former piano teacher. I can't be there, so I'm posting something here instead. I wish I could post the Arabesque No.1 by Debussy and forgo the words.

Mrs. Helder was my teacher since I was twelve. Even after high school, after seven years of weekly lessons came to an end, I would stop by to visit Mrs. Helder, to talk music and have tea. At some point I can’t recall, she became part of our family. And as she came to need increasing care over the last five years, it was my amazing, generous parents who stepped in to fill in all the gaps.

My piano lessons were always Tuesday afternoons at 3.30pm, and I would rush there from school, mind going a mile a minute about everything but piano. But you step into Mrs. Helder’s home, and then you sit and wait. And you breathe. Her home was so formal. Aside from the hundred musician-themed knick-knacks, you wouldn’t guess she received a regular rotation of children and teens every week. And then its time for your lesson, and you go sit at her huge baby grand (I promise, it was the size of a small house) and begin your hour-long lesson.

In Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen talks about the role of a teacher as ultimately one of hospitality. A good teacher is not someone who tries to get things stuck to your brain like flypaper, but someone who invites you into a room and helps you explore the world. Mrs. Helder was like that. She would invite you into her room, and help you explore music.

She was a perfectionist, a stickler for details. Sometimes you could do nothing right, and she made you begin that dang Bach invention twelve times until you gave the left hand enough emphasis. Or she would make you suffer through two-against-three scales over and over until you got them even. She would make you work on Mozart when all your practice time had been on Chopin. She would lead you rhetorically to admit that you were using improper arm weight, even though you knew better.

Mrs. Helder had no children of her own, so I think she put some of that investment and love into her students. I can recall our August teatimes, just before I would head back to college, when I would stop by to find piles of music books and notes strewn everywhere. Each student would have a detailed lesson plan on top of a pile of music books, painstakingly-selected from her library. I remember saying goodbye at my last piano lesson, just before high school graduation, and how I sat on her piano bench and cried my eyes out. And how she said to me, "There, there now."

She treated us like we were important musicians. Like it mattered to Bach and Chopin (and those crazy moderns) that we phrased correctly, and practiced dynamics, and strove for perfection, whatever the level of music. Once in a blue moon, next to your practice directives from the previous week, she would write "Excellent". That was about as good as it gets. I can recall three Excellents in seven years of lessons. To this day I'm proud of those three lessons.

Mrs. Helder, thank you for your hospitality as a teacher, for your cultivation of Excellence, for teaching me to make and to love music.