Don’t Think

Don’t think of the roses on the trellis overhead—you motoring through, captain of your tricycle. Don’t think of the birdbath either—where robins and blue jays drank or just rested—nor of the giant copper beech tree near it that you later climbed until you could enter your house through your bedroom window. It was also by the birdbath that you sometimes sang those first songs you learned in school like “At the Gates of Heaven” or later “Volare.” Songs that seemed to have spread over the entire earth. Don’t remember either the red rubber ball you’d throw against the garage wall or sometimes off its roof while you played imaginary baseball games with yourself or eventually with your friends. In right field was the enormous weeping willow tree that you used to climb with your sister and to the right of that, the bright yellow forsythia bushes. Everything was large and bright in your backyard, even the gray cement patio from which you had snowball fights.

Your house had three floors (not counting its mysterious cellar) and 21 rooms, each one more like a district of a city than a mere room. Your sister’s bedroom was opposite yours and next to the upstairs den. Adjacent to that was your father’s room separated by the television room (from which you had a clear view of the schoolyard) from your mother’s room. Why did they have separate rooms? Don’t think of how much older he was than your mother and how you also were a father late in life. Don’t think of how you ran in frenzied circles from your sister’s room one night. You had been shocked by what you saw there when you’d barged in unannounced to sharpen your pencil. Your sister and another girl were lying naked in bed. You finally ran into your mother’s room. Forget that your mother guessed what it was without your telling her—her special kind of knowledge. Don’t remember either the many times you lay on your mother’s bed holding her white French poodle while she practiced her violin, then, when she was finished, how she’d lay next to you. Don’t think of all your mother’s kisses or of the time you couldn’t sleep because you were either too hot or too cold and your father stayed by your bed lifting up the blanket and then lowering it until you finally fell asleep. Don’t realize you will never be loved that way again.

The sun room, the music room with its grand piano, and outside a hill you could sled down in the winter snow with your sister and at the bottom look up at the two rows of cement stairs with their black railing above them, like the mane of a frozen horse, that led to the front of the house, a house that looked like a palace.

But one day you’d look at the music room windows to the right of the front door and you’d remember your mother making you repeat the same little piece until every note was perfect. Meanwhile, your friends were at the schoolyard waiting for you to play with them. Yet she made you repeat every note until it was 100% correct. You can still see how you cried then—a waterfall of tears—until it ended with her, at last, relenting. Later, your father told her not to force you to play the piano and she agreed and so you had the last real lesson of your life from your mother that day when you were 7 years old and didn’t become a great musician like them. The whole course of your life was determined in an afternoon. Your parents were both child prodigies, but you would never study music though you tried briefly a few other times. And although you later made up scores of songs and little piano pieces, you never learned to read or write music and eventually could only play seven or eight of your pieces by memory...