They started each of their three children on the piano at six. Our family was spending a year in England when I, the youngest, was introduced to the magical Middle C. Back in Wisconsin I continued practicing on the pianos that stood to one side of our living room, the friendly mahogany face of the old Steinway upright gazing at the cantilevered top of the1928 black Steinway grand.

Though no prodigies were forthcoming, my mother's plan for ensuring musical offspring was successful, and our family lived to a soundtrack of practice, records and radio. WHA, Madison's classical station, accompanied pancakes and coffee. Jonathan came home from school and thundered at full speed through Chopin's Nocturnes, or Heidi would be found interpreting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, leaping on and off the stage of the living room rug. In the evenings a difficult passage of a Brahms trio, patiently reiterated by my father faintly reached the upstairs as I did my homework. And I sang: to the indestructible 78s inherited from my siblings, to their current fare--Joni Mitchell and the Beatles--and to the Peter, Paul and Mary records of my parents.

A summer musicale was the main event of the year. Neighbors and colleagues crowded the sofas and rows of folding chairs, spilling over to the floor where they sat balancing wine glasses on their knees. I took my place at the piano as page-turner, and as the musicians settled themselves with their instruments the room grew warm and quiet, charged with expectation. With a nod the music would begin: the violinist swaying, the cello in the cellist's embrace, the piano keys under my father's fingers giving forth the softest hush of sound. In the allegro movement, I grew tense with the importance of my role, holding the corner of the music gingerly between thumb and index fingers, eyes fixed on the rapidly advancing columns of notes yet watching for Dad's quick nod to confirm the turn -- now! -- of the page.

When I was nine and between piano teachers, Dad took the position temporarily. Sitting beside me on the bench he played slowly, stopping after each bar to pencil in the fingerings for a new piece-- Bach's First Invention.

"Start with the right hand," he said, "and play slowly enough that you're getting it right. Otherwise you're practicing your mistakes. Only when you feel that your right hand is confident with the passage should you add the left." I set my fingers shyly on the keys, embarrassed to be watched so closely. He gently guided my small wrist to the proper position.

Before his eyes I practiced dutifully, patiently correcting the stumbles onto flats and sharps that could so easily become discordant habits. Alone, I tore through the easy parts and skipped over the difficult. Eventually pieces were reduced to a few sections which I played deftly at breakneck speed, my hands feeling clever and full of life as the notes leapt from the tips of my fingers to the smooth keys.

I never learned to count time, or did, then stubbornly unlearned it. Calculations reigned in my haphazard joy. Wasn't it enough to know that the black notes were shorter than the white, that a dot after a note increased it by half? A wing and a prayer seemed a more appropriate, if less accurate, means of passage than arithmetic.

But the notes continued to gather, dark and demanding, forbidding as storm clouds. Various and important matters --high school, horses, Elton John-- began increasingly to require my attention. I postponed piano lessons frequently, and then, at fifteen, indefinitely. I would begin again tomorrow, or next year, or whenever I had acquired infinite patience and discipline, even genius.

Fifteen years later I sat down at a piano. I felt like a friend who had moved away and never written, longing for a welcome I didn't deserve. I stared at the keyboard and it stared back, inscrutable as a china doll whose painted smile always offers two, then three, then two, the white keys nestled securely in between, the Bs and Cs shoulder to shoulder in the intimacy of the half-step, the perfect octaves repeating themselves until the highest and lowest notes trail off into some inaccessible realm. I placed my hands on the keys and a few measures of the First Invention flew from them, as though my finger's native language. Just as quickly the notes trailed off into uncertainty.

After our Christmas dinner last year, Jonathan, accomplished at jazz, classical, and salsa, played for the family and friends gathered around my aunt's fireplace. He led off with the Christmas Fantasia, a tradition started by my father.

"Dad!" he called, when it had ended, setting another piece of music on the stand. "Play this one with me." My father protested, smiling.

"No, no, you go ahead."

Come on," Jonathan insisted. "Just the first section."

Dad joined him at my aunt's piano, the one she inherited from their parents, and on which he started lessons at the age of five. They hammed up the romantic old chestnut Jonathan had chosen and their audience laughed with them. But Dad wasn't hearing the music as much as remembering it, and his hands played mostly out of habit. Hearing aids make voices audible, but in the last year a single melody line is all that remains distinguishable to him; with harmony music becomes a dull roar. His grandmother became hard of hearing, as did his father.

"I have other things in my life," he said firmly, when I asked why he never seems bitter at the loss.

"But doesn't it make you angry?"

"No," he said. "Just very sad."

"Well, it makes me angry," I told him, starting to cry, and then he cried too.

I have a black and white photograph taken in 1964: My brother and sister, seated in folding chairs, are drawing the bows across the strings of their second instruments, the cello and violin. Between them I am perched atop a pillow on the upright's bench. My hands poised as though to play, I have turned the radiance of a four-year-old's electric smile on my father's camera, joyful at pretending.

Music. So much music that years later I find myself singing, with unthinking accuracy, to melodies I didn't know I knew. My father's--and mother's--gift to us. But part of that gift has been rescinded--by time, by carelessness, by the body's fallibility--and I sing a silent litany of regret: If I had known .... If I had kept going... If I had learned the pieces that now sit on my bookshelf while my father could still hear them.

I see us in some imaginary present, a present that could only have proceeded from a different past. There has been more discipline, more attention to what I love. Nerves still vibrate in sympathy with sound. In this other, parallel present, Dad and I sit before the household god of my childhood, its heavy lid raised and baring the taut strings, the animating soul of its ebony body. The music before us, a duet, is worn from use, the pages soft, the penciled fingering faded. We stop playing now and then to talk about the nuance of a passage.

"There is an arc to every phrase," he reminds me, "a note that you're reaching for." His hands travel the keys with the kinetic wisdom of many hours. Mine are also sure in their knowledge; they have earned their musical inheritance. My fingers, long like my father's, move beside his. We play well.