I spilled (well, a cat spilled) a large amount of liquid onto the right-hand side of my piano, and now the high keys are stuck.

Honestly, I haven’t been playing. I haven’t played anything in months, and haven’t done serious practicing in years. Shamefully enough, the piano bench is being used as a TV stand right now.

When I was a kid, my mother played the piano occasionally. I always fussed at her, demanding she teach me to play, but when she’d try to start at the beginning, I’d get impatient and refuse to learn. I didn’t want to learn to play the piano, I wanted to learn to play music.

She gave up after a half a dozen attempts to teach me. When I interrupted her yet again, this time while she was playing Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” she handed me the music, jabbed at the starting key, and told me to teach myself.

I did.

It was a bad lesson to learn at age 5 or thereabouts, and it has had repercussions throughout my life. I don’t learn things from the beginning. I don’t set a foundation of good habits and the basics.

It’s a failure of imagination. I can’t see how the building blocks eventually make a building.

I haven’t been playing. My sheet music of “Clair de Lune” had dust on it, and not a tiny sprinkling of it, either, so I get to have the embarrassment of poor housekeeping on top of failure to practice.

So, I can either look at my history and say, “Too bad I didn’t put the building blocks into place,” or I can say, “Good thing I didn’t let a few scales and finger exercises get in my way of playing Beethoven.”