I Was Fired.

Once in a while, my friends and I talk about our failures in life. Most of us are willing to admit to a few, although there are still some old men who can’t talk about anything except their wonderful successes. The truth is, no successful man or woman has not had a couple of failures. After all, it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. One of our guys told a pretty amusing story about one of his failures. Here is what he told us:

My piano teacher's name was Mrs. Henry. She was an elegant lady of maybe 70 years old. I was about 40 years old and thought she was quite old. Today, I would say she was young. She taught classical piano, and I signed up mostly to see if I could ever learn to play well enough to play what I liked. My dream was to play jazz in some smoke-filled bar downtown full of adoring fans.

I signed up for one lesson per week at 7 PM. Of course, at the time I was working 10-hour days, had three young children and a wife, and lots of things to do. But I thought I really would like to try piano and that it might become a lifelong hobby. It did not.

My lesson came right after she would give a lesson to a little, young, precocious kid whose feet could barely reach the floor when he sat on the piano bench. I learned to dislike the little brat after a lesson or two. We both started with simple exercises and something called March of the Wooden Soldiers (although it could have been March of the Toy Soldiers, but I can't really recall).

Then there was this idea Mrs. Henry had that I should practice at least five days a week for a half hour. Occasionally, I found time to practice, much to the amusement of my three children, who had already taken piano lessons. After about four months of this, I arrived at my lesson to hear the little smarty-pants pupil whose lesson preceded mine ripping through some fancy tune by Chopin or maybe Mozart. A real show-off.

I sat down at the piano and started on my March of the Toy/Wooden Soldiers. The metronome was clicking away. I could hear my teacher saying goodbye to the little punk and telling his mother what a great pupil her son was.

Then Mrs. Henry came over and sat down beside me on the piano bench. She said that she had two extra tickets to a Philadelphia Orchestra concert coming up in a week and thought I might be better off spending my time going to the orchestra than taking more piano lessons.

That ended my piano career. (I did not go to the orchestra either.) No Carnegie Hall recital for me; no smoke-filled bar playing jazz piano, ala Bill Evans! I was toast.  I had been fired, dismissed, let go, or whatever you want to call it! To fail occasionally is a good lesson. And, of course, my wife and children found it all tremendously amusing and still talk about it to this day.

☕ Pull Up a Chair

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