sometimes one note will do

when i was growing up we were not an i love you family.we certainly found such affection lovely we just didn't do it. i think saying i love you was viewed as overkilll, not unlike saying, dont forget to breathe at school today. or maybe it was a stubborn refusal to be obvious. love was to seen in every hard- earned compliment, in every fair punishment,in every one of those thousand movies my mother took me to see in the very act of my father getting up before dawn to go the factory, and in every game of catch he found the energy to play in the afternoon.
I was thinking about all of this on Saturday at my daughters piano recital. i have never inssited they do anything with their free time except learn how to play the piano. i carried this from childhood. we didnt have much back then on my dads salary and we justs couldnt afford lessons.
my daughters have mostly accepted this demand with good humour. this has meant, through the year, that ours house has been filled with a few muffled complaints mixed in with slightly off-key version of songs with names like up the stairs with a cat and the mountain bird this recital season. the day of recital , i was listening to katie practise the entertainment and i noticed something.