A key

C minor. The scale starts on the basic C, the middle C of the piano I remember from when I was a little girl, taking lessons from Sean Larney for the first time. My Daddy insisted that I go to Mr. Larney, whom he had known in college. There I was, seven years old in the back music room of old Mrs. O'Toole's house, that goofy middle-ages piano teacher with the funny teeth and the large glasses pointing to middle C. "This is where it all begins, little Agnes."  So I played the note and Mr. Larney feigned a cataclysm and said, "Wrong!"

And we were off and running. For twelve precious years I spent the best hour of every week in Mr. Larney's music salon. We worked through finger exercises, scales, arpeggios, the John Thompson music books. We mastered Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. All of my music led to Beethoven, somehow -- Mr. Larney loved Beethoven, and I have to admit, so did I -- and all of the music led to C minor. There were the four-handed variations on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ... in C minor. There was his third piano concerto; Mr. Larney played the orchestra part on his piano while I did the solo ... in C minor. There was the final piano sonata, that masterful, ethereal epic on the nature of Heaven and Hell ... in C minor.  And let's not forget our Mozart -- his twenty-fourth piano concerto, on which Beethoven based his third ... both in C minor.

Somehow, the sadness of that minor key and the profound longing in all of this music suited the both of us. Here we were, a young Irish Catholic girl and a middle-aged gay man in the 1920s ... somehow thriving. When I was eight, Daddy died in the great flu epidemic and, somehow, I learned to manage. After all, I had my weekly piano lessons to look forward to.