Woodshedding

         A few years I retired from my community orchestra because a hand tremor (probably induced by a psychiatric drug I take) prevented me from controlling the viola bow adequately. It then occurred to me to try the piano as a sort of occupational therapy. It was slow at first and my fingers would hit keys randomly, but I kept at it and improved. Surprisingly, being a beginner piano student after playing viola in an orchestra for years wasn’t frustrating. From the first lesson, every time, literally every time I sit down to play I enjoy the music I make.

A familiar term in school and community orchestras, usually directed by the conductor to the string players, is ‘woodshed’. It means to work on a small section of music, playing it over and over until it’s mastered. I’ve always pictured a fiddler standing behind a woodshed, out of earshot, to drill difficult sections of music. Funny story: my current piano teacher, Cami, and I were talking about a piece and I said I just needed to woodshed. She had never heard that term. I laughed: I’d heard it dozens of times. Hard to imagine someone dragging a piano out past the old woodshed.



          Woodshedding is challenging for me. For a day or two I’ll buckle down, practicing one phrase at a time, over and over, one hand at a time, then both hands together. But soon I’m back to trying to play the piece from beginning to end in one shot.

  Does this relate to grief? I think it does. Maybe it’s a stretch, but being in the moment, accepting the pain and sitting with it, seems a bit like woodshedding, which is sitting with the pain of imperfection and the boredom of repetition, not letting distractions win out. In music it’s the distraction of wanting to play to whole thing at once, before I’m ready. In grief it’s wanting to rush ahead to that place where it doesn’t hurt and life returns to normal.
I don’t mean to say I don’t have good days and accomplishments. It’s just that every time I feel intense grief I resist sitting with it. It does hurt, I mourn the losses: our loss of our son, his loss of life, the world’s loss of a good man.