Why my Dad was Scared of Piano Music

My dad wasn't easy to get to know. People who knew him would say he was quiet or spoke few words, but I saw someone who had shut themselves off from the world. Everywhere you looked, there seemed to be a shadow. As bad as waking up. At night, I would sometimes see him sitting in his chair and looking out the window. He was holding on to the arms of the chair so tightly that I thought his hands would bleed. He would slouch forward so much that he almost fell out of his chair, as if he thought something terrible and impossible would happen at any moment. My dad was a man who was filled with fear. It's something I only understood as I aged. The best person to find out about it was my mother.

But not well enough. Not nearly well enough.

Piano music scared my dad more than anything else. It didn't matter if it was played in a lift, on TV or by a hobbyist piano in a shopping mall who wanted to show off. No matter if it was jazz or classical. No matter how happy or sad it was. Simple or hard. He would get stars in his eyes whenever he heard the sound of a piano. He would get very pale skin. He would look all over the place and shake his head back and forth like a dog handling a bone. I never got up the nerve to ask him why he was scared of it. Why didn't I just ask him? But it wasn't something we talked about in our house. It's easy to catch fear. And the best way to get over it is to talk about it. My dad was afraid, and that fear stayed with us all our lives, like a piano that was never sold. For years, it just hung there…