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我八岁开始学习钢琴，老师换了一个又一个，钢琴课总是让我欢喜让我忧。63岁时，我终于发现：原来人生可以有更好的选择。 I was eight when I met my first piano teacher. I remember everything about her. Tuesdays after school I would drag my reluctant little-girl self down the hill toward her brown-brick house by the shoe factory.[1] Every trudging step took me closer to the doom I knew awaited.[2] Sameness[3] ruled in the piano teacher’s house—let’s call her Mrs. Kaufman. I assumed there was a Mr. Kaufman stuffed away in a corner somewhere, but I never laid eyes on him. The only dress I remember on Mrs. Kaufman matched the colour of the bricks of her house. Her grey hair was pulled back in a chignon so tightly that it stretched the corners of her mouth into a taut blue line.[4] I’d step into the gloom of the hallway and hang my coat on one of the wooden pegs.[5] She would usher me wordlessly into her sitting room.[6] The heavy damask[7] curtains, I imagined, had never been drawn during the 200 years that I was certain she had lived there with the invisible Mr. Kaufman. Mrs. Kaufman would begin each lesson with a throat-clearing sound that I roughly translated into “take your seat”. I knew enough to leave room on the hard bench[8] for her to join me. On the shelf by the music sat her long wooden stick, meant to refashion recalcitrant schoolgirl fingers into well-rounded arches.[9] Now and again I’d feel its light tap upon my knuckles.[10] On occasion, Mrs. Kaufman would daub[11] the end of her nose with a lace handkerchief. The hanky would then disappear into the folds of her brown dress.[12] | 
