Welcome to Rumbull Strip, Vermont. Today a short story I wrote a few years ago about my son and piano practice.

Parents are out there listening. I'm sure that you don't have days like these, but at my house we do. Here's piano practice.

My son Henry practices piano in the morning before school. This is a hard-won practice, but has become routine. But when he's frustrated in his practice, which is often he wants to kill the piano.

He also wants me to know that somehow the frustration he feels is my fault.

And I understand this, because I feel exactly the same way when I practice the guitar.

And I also remember practicing the flute at his age and feeling rage at my mother who was listening downstairs.

So he gets his musical petulance from me.

And I hate this about myself.

And part of the reason I want Henry to learn an instrument is so he can learn

how to get through the rage at learning something new, something that's hard, and feel the satisfaction

at having overcome his frustration alone.

So when he misses that B flat again and he says,

Mom can you please help me? I know the right answer. But on this day I say yes I'll help and I go in there and he

starts the song again and again he misses the B flat and I say well

just stop and practice that one part but before I finish saying this he yells no

mom I hate this song and I can't do it and you don't know and you

have awful coffee breath and I feel a kind of white-hot rage, not unlike what he's feeling, and instead of walking out

calmly, I storm out angrily, and I tell him I'm going to the barn to feed the cow.

And I hear him say as I'm storming out,

oh that's right, just walk out, just walk out of the argument. I go out to the barn and there's Charlie Ann the cow and she's waiting for me.

Charlie, I say, I don't like him for me. Charlie, I say, I don't like him very much.

I mean, I love him, but I don't like him very much.

...