By: Diane Wakoski
Poet’s Introduction: When I had been living in New York several years after I had graduated from Berkeley, I heard from my mother who lived in Southern California where I grew up. During the call (I hate telephones and almost never talk on them), she said, “All those years I paid for your piano lessons, and now you don’t even play the piano.” I decided that instead of being angry that she was trying to make me feel guilty about my life, I would write this poem to help her understand how important the piano lessons still were to me, all these years later, and that even though I didn’t play the piano any longer, the lessons continued to shape my life. [Read more…]