By Jim Nichols

As an early teenager, it was a short trip either walking or bicycling. Head south on our residential street to Johnson Drive, then west toward the high school. Mrs. Scott, the piano teacher, lived across the street from the school. Through the front door and to the right was her piano room; in retrospect, I think it was a remodeled garage in her 1940s house.

My parents wanted me to learn to play the piano and Mrs. Scott was recommended as my teacher. She charged fifty cents for a half-hour lesson. As I got older and more proficient, I got a 45-minute lesson for seventy-five cents. We had a positive relationship for many years and she gently informed, encouraged, and pressured me to learn, which I did. We moved through a series of lesson books starting with straightforward scales and gradually moving to pieces and even sheet music that sounded more like real songs to me. Most of the books had yellow covers and were published by the Schirmer Company. Several of my friends took lessons from her, and every month Mrs. Scott had us meet at one of our homes for “piano club.” We had to play a piece for each other, and it was one of the most stressful events of my young life. On our birthdays she gave each student small biographies of famous composers and white five-inch-tall busts of composers. 

My parents were pleased with my progress and made me come to their Sunday school class four different times to play. Mrs. Scott had sequentially assigned me to learn simplified versions of the military themes (Marines, Navy, Air Force, Army). I guess that was because I was a boy. I am still embarrassed about those performances for multiple reasons.

I did not practice as much as Mrs. Scott (or my parents) wanted me to, but she had a saying that others have used on me. “When you make a mistake, go back and start again. Every time you see it, the problem seems smaller.”

Recently a plumber at our house diagnosed and repaired a problem in about one-tenth the time it would have taken me. When I asked him how he could so quickly identify the issue, he said, “After seeing the same problem repeatedly, it is not a challenge or a surprise; you can then address it easily and quickly.”

Two weeks later we employed an electrician to consider something I had tried to remedy but failed; it took him about five minutes. When I asked the same question that I had asked the plumber, he said almost word for word what the plumber had said. Mrs. Scott, the piano teacher, lived on. 

Our modern world has put us at the mercy of technology problems. Our houses and cars contain chips that do not come from potatoes. Until one loses it, one does not realize as a company employee how comforting it is to be able to contact “tech support” when blank screens appear unexpectedly. At the hospital where I work, there are smart people 24 hours a day who can take control of my office computer and repair it probably in between sips of coffee. It is quite amazing.

We have a person who seems like a genius to me who helps us with our home technology IT problems. Just a phone call or a text away, he will either come to our home or take remote control of our computer and walk me through a solution. I have yet to present him with a problem for which he seems unfamiliar. If he appears puzzled for 30 seconds, he immediately begins a work-around to address the problem. I wonder if he took piano lessons from Mrs. Scott.

The pattern that seems evident is that we do not know how to do something the first time we try—maybe not even the second or third. Fortunately, we usually have multiple opportunities to practice and become more proficient. When we continue to be stumped, I am grateful for experienced people to come to the rescue. Clearly, they themselves have faced these same problems before and now those problems are familiar and solvable. I am thankful for them.

 Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain