You were my mother’s first love—parasocial, but still so.

I’ve changed in oh so many ways, like you started singing that I would when I was yet far too young to have that feeling. Now, changed, I can see what she saw, see how beautiful you are. Now, changed, I can hear what you heard, hear how “all music is contained” in the piano.

I am exhilarated by the piano. Oh, for the first time in my life, I’ve fallen in particular love with the piano as an instrument, a turn taken only in the past week as I’ve learned to quickly find and hear a range of chords and chord voicings. Finally, for the first time in my life, I am not merely parroting notes as written but finding the music as it lives and waits for me inside the instrument. There’s no feeling like this before, nowhere in my life. It’s overwhelming.

This magical instrument captivates me because music played on piano becomes visual patterns marked by spans and relationships. Chords don’t just sound like outlined structures, they look like structures. Notes don’t just sound like risen and fallen waves, they look like waves. Shapes and colors creating worlds through sound; lines and rhythms sketching character and motion. This is the piano. This is how I have always heard music in my mind, from my earliest memories of sound—memories that you shaped as much as your pARTner, and together with him you shaped sound for me far more, far earlier than anyone else. John is my spiritual father, as another moment in the space describes, and you are my dearest uncle.

And on piano, all those synesthesic wonders of shape and color and line and rhythm are made material. YES! Just as you said on a strange, George-less Tuesday in an impromptu lecture on the instrument’s vitality to a documentary crew member who happened to share your name, “all music is contained” in the piano. I sensed it a little early on, giggling as I grappled with my minimally progressing efforts to engage the keys, giggling that even though my learning was achingly thin compared to Amy’s, she had chords she had not yet found on her guitar while I could, I realized, find any chord on the piano. Given a great deal of time to pick it out, to be sure, but still so. All music.

You are as famous as anyone in the history of human life for having the gift of frighteningly prodigious musical facility that never needed formal learning. Singing, playing piano and guitar and bass and even sometimes drums in ways that make each of these voices transparent, seamless reflections of your imagination, these are qualities in you that made me feel set far, far apart from you, my dear uncle. John struggled, in every wrathful and mourning breath, through every schoolboy barb, with his existential clutching, and I related to that, while you in your separate way seemed ever and ever content to simply let it be.

But now, changed, I see that you have the impromptu lecturer in you, too, and a work ethic that I admire with astonishment, and a profound belief in the relational dimensions of making and engaging art—and through these qualities I feel much more fully for you, fellow lefty, dear uncle. Now, changed, I hear myself starting the long and wondering road toward the piano as a unique part of my life.

And I make sense of this, peculiarly, as an inheritance. And I am delighted. And I am changed.