A Birthday, a Piano, and Climbing to New Heights

Mar 12, 2025

Since I last wrote, I’ve had one of those special birthdays that comes along with a brand new piano. Eeek! So I’ve been spending most of my free time getting to know its sound. My other one was a one-hundred-year-old spinet—okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, and it wasn’t exactly 100 years old, but it surely sounded like it. All is to say: towards the end of its days with me, it clanged and groaned for its retirement; I’m NOT mourning its departure; and I love my new piano.

I celebrated with champagne, chocolate cake (is there really any other?), sushi and climbing—which I might now be officially addicted to. Doing it gives me the perfect ratio of anxiety and elation. Have you ever watched Free Solo?

Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching:

It wasn’t consciously planned on my part, but a theme of the passage of time and human resilience features strongly, starting with—

The Tobacconist by the Austrian writer, Robert Seethaler

which is the coming-of-age story of a naive seventeen-year-old boy who leaves his beloved childhood village in the Austrian lake district of Attersee to apprentice at a tobacco shop in Vienna. There he starts up a friendship with Sigmund Freud who helps him with his love problems. It’s not surprising the writer is a Man Booker International Prize Finalist. There’s an old-fashioned story-telling quality to Robert Seethaler’s writing. I love books where, from the first sentence, the writer sweeps me into the tale they’re about to tell, and I know I’m in good hands.

One Sunday, in the late summer of 1937, an unusually violent thunderstorm swept over the mountains of the Salzkammergut. Until then, Franz Huchel's life had trickled along fairly uneventfully, but this thunderstorm was to give it a sudden turn that had far-reaching consequences. As soon as he heard the first distant rumble of thunder, Franz ran inside the little fisherman's cottage where he lived with his mother in the village of Nussdorf am Attersee and crawled into bed to listen to the unearthly racket from the safety of his warm and downy cave.
—how Robert Seethaler starts his story

He takes a serious subject, the story takes place at beginning of the Nazi occupation of Vienna, and renders it tender and lyrical, as he leads the reader from one sentences to the next, making the book hard to put down. Already by the third sentence in, we know the kind of person our protagonist is. Not to worry—by the end, Franz becomes a true hero, a far different person from the boy who went running from a thunderstorm to the safety of his bed. The Tobacconist is a fitting book for these times that feel to me as though history is about to repeat itself. We see what it looks like when one country annexes another, and how easy it is to turn an entire population. Thank heavens for those who refuse to play along.

The Boy in the Woods directed by Rebecca Snow

Is a film based on Maxwell Smart’s memoir about his time as an eleven-year-old boy, hiding for months alone in the forests of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. There he befriends a younger boy who is doing the same, and the two, on one of their adventures trying to stay alive, save a baby girl who they find lying in her dead mother’s arms. Be forewarned the story is a tearjerker. And a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. The boy went on to become a successful businessman, rediscover painting and open two galleries in Montreal.

Dream State by Eric Puchner

This book is about three characters, the first is Cece who arrives in a town in Montana called Salish to plan her wedding to her fiancé Charlie, a newish doctor. There she meets Garrett, a baggage handler and her fiancé’s best man and best friend, when he shows up on Charlie’s request to deliver weed that Cece needs as a sleep aid. She hates him at first sight. But on the night before her wedding, where everyone who’s supposed to attend gets the Norovirus, including Charlie the groom, Garrrett sends her an email that changes their lives. I absolutely loved this book! It’s long (I love long books), and it’s such a cool meditation on marriage, life and the passage of time. It spans 50 years, some of them which take us into a very well-imagined future. Eric Puchner is a master of character. His characters are unique and raw, flawed and well drawn out. He’s also a master of throwing his reader into different scenes in his character’s lives and getting them to deduce what’s happened. The scene’s aren’t always chronological, and the story doesn’t come neatly wrapped in a bow. It’s real and the characters age in a real way. His prose never falters. It remains exquisite through to the last word.

I’m Still Here directed by Walter Salles

Which was this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, and another meditation on the passage of time and how steadfast the human spirit can be. It’s a moving image of the lives of the Paiva family in Brazil that starts in the 1970s during the dictatorship that became know for its detentions and disappearances and continues on through to 2014.

À la Car, a short film, directed by the two Gen Z filmmakers,

Miles Mendes and Kangan Bansal. It’s about a gaggle of teenagers stuck in the middle of nowhere who run into an unfortunate surprise and have to then clean it up. If you like bizarre, slightly uncomfortable but hilarious, watch this. Here’s hoping you have a stronger stomach than I do.

Time is one of my favourite subjects to meditate on. Sometimes when I’m at my piano, practicing, and I have the metronome going, ticking on and on, with no regard for the mistakes I make, I’m reminded of time and how it, too, stops for nothing.

While going through my grandmother’s mementos, I came across this picture of one of my uncles’ wedding, and I was struck by the image of myself, the little flower girl in my grandfather’s arms. I very, very vaguely remember this moment. I had just turned four. I don’t have many pictures of me with my grandfather, and none with me in his arms. I absolutely adored him, and he me. And looking at the picture made me nostalgic about the feeling of being able to surrender into his bear embrace.

Was your month as contemplative as mine? And what are some of the things you think about in fleeting moments when you’re looking out of the window? I’d love to know. Plus, please leave the names of books or anything you’ve watched and you think I’d like.