If I want to be good, I have to practice
/St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
Beverly Beckham
Every afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano.
"So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.
"Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day.
"How'd you do on your vocabulary test?"
"We didn't have it. Wanna' hear me play Remington Steele?
I sit and listen to Remington Steele and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and Jingle Bells and M'Lavoh, a series of songs that takes my daughter less than five minutes to play but has taken her hours of practice to learn.
"Well?" she says when she's finished, sitting straight on the bench, looking as pleased as a cook who's just served a chocolate cake and knows that it's delicious.
"That was excellent," I tell her, and she grins and takes mock bows and says, "Thank you. Thank you," in a Grammy-award winning tone, then turns back to the piano and a tune she hasn't mastered and continues to practice it until she does.
"I wish I could play the piano like Emily," she said a few months ago. "Emily is awesome."
"How long's Emily been taking lessons?" I asked her.
"I don't know. Maybe a year. Can I take lessons, too?"
In December she began, and the piano hasn't stopped singing since.
Now instead of watching television, instead of coloring, instead of cleaning her room ("Oh, Mom! "), she practices.
She was the same way with gymnastics . When she was 4, maybe 5, she got it in her head that she wanted to be a "gymnastic person." So she started doing cartwheels, and she did them everywhere, through all the rooms of the house, in the aisles of the grocery store, on the sidewalks of our town. After a while she was doing perfect cartwheels, effortlessly, sometimes unconsciously. Once, in the middle of a soccer game (a sport she abandoned after just two matches), the entire team was at one end of the field with the ball and the opposing team, and there she was miles away in her head, upside down, her toes pointed straight in the air, a smile of accomplishment on her inverted face.
"If I want to be good, I have to practice," she announced when the game was over, after she'd cartwheeled off the field.
And practice she did. From cartwheels to back walkovers to back handsprings to back extensions. Over months, over seasons, over years.
None of it was easy. Each accomplishment was preceded by weeks of effort, of doing the same thing again and again and again. . Even when she was tired, even when she was sore, even when her friends begged her to take a day off to sleep at their house or to see a movie, she said no, she had to go to gymnastics.
"I wish I could do that," I said a few weeks ago while watching her bend and stretch and move in a way that is more liquid than solid, that continually awes me because she is graceful and I am not. And for the moment, even I forgot the dues she'd paid; even I neglected to remember that she didn't just wake up that morning, roll out of bed and magically perform like a dancer.
Yet, watching, it seemed she had, it seemed so simple, that I yearned to do the same thing.
"Don't you ever get frustrated?" I ask her now as she sits at the piano. "Don't you want to play more songs than the ones you know?”
"I will someday," she says. "All I have to do is keep practicing, and I'll keep getting better."
And she will. She knows, with a child's wisdom, that some things aren't immediate. Some things require time. And perseverance. And patience.
