Albert Yang
Writing I: Section #67
Essay #1: Final Draft
10/12/2017
My Piano
As all my friends and families know, I am a passionate piano lover. Whenever some friends or relatives come to my home, I perform my best music to show my hospitality instead of offering them a good meal or exciting parties. Everybody enjoys my performance, so they give me a nickname, the “Little Liszt.” I love my piano very much, but our relationship is more complicated than it seems.
I was five years old, and it was a lovely summer day so, as usual, I was playing with my peers in the backyard of my home. After finishing my lunch, I was about to go out again, but my mother stopped me, telling me that we were going to see my piano teacher. On my way there, I felt extremely nervous because I was an introverted boy who was afraid of talking to unfamiliar people and was worried about whether my teacher would be strict with me. After introductions, I sat in front of the black giant. It was about twice my height, standing there solemnly and causing me to shiver. However, when I hit the first note, the High C, the amazing sound immediately grabbed my attention. I hit other notes one by one, faster and faster. The high notes sounded like the songs of birds in hot summer days, while the low notes roared like a lion that made me tremble. Pressing them together produced a resonant, elegant and mysterious sound that made me miss my teacher’s instructions. At the end of the class, my teacher did not seem to be satisfied, but I fell in love with that black giant and decided that I would produce the most beautiful music in the future.
In the first several months, music flowed in my room every day and night. Although the music was neither complicated nor charming, every note that came out of my hands revealed my love. However, my love did not last for a long time. I gradually felt exhausted about practicing over and over again. Since then, the simple and lovely sounds rarely appear in my room. I was continually distracted by the toys or video games, such as my favorite electronic dinosaur and my game boy, in my room, and as a result, my teacher blamed me because I could not push every note accurately and emotionally as he asked, which discouraged me and made me hate piano more. After several weeks, my mother found out what happened to my practice and started to pay more attention to my practicing. “I will keep watching you in the next hour, and you must stay focus.” At first, I listened to my mother because I was scared, but after two or three years, as I grew up, I started to disobey her. When she supervised me, I found some excuses, like stomachache, to escape my practice. Sometimes I would move the clock’s minute hand forward ten minutes to make the practice end more quickly. However, sometimes my mother caught what I did, so I had a lot of quarrels with her. “If you do not like it anymore, you should not go to class and waste my money there.” She shouted at me every day. I thou...
