Asa Desai ’25
The sustain pedal. Essentially, it elongates notes played on a piano. It can transform a happy piece into a melancholy one. It can cause authentic applause. It can make your grandmother cry. It brings humanity, soul, and softness into a piece. A piano is not complete without one, or so I thought.
I was fortunate enough to know my great-grandfather. He walked me to school when he came to visit. He loved old jazz standards, and his favorite was “Misty.” I played it for him at his nursing home when he could no longer remember anyone’s name, but he hummed along with every note, conducting from his wheelchair. That was the last time I saw him alive. His dementia worsened, and he died the next year, when I started high school.
I was asked to play at his memorial service one summer afternoon in West Virginia, the site of many happy family reunions. As I sat down and began to warm up, I came to the alarming discovery that the digital upright piano provided did not have a sustain pedal. What soulless keyboard programmer had overlooked this essential component? Fanning themselves with his memorial program, over a hundred attendees waited patiently in the sweltering heat while I struggled to navigate this foreign situation. After adjusting the controls as best I could, there was nothing left to do but start playing. As I progressed through the piece, I realized that without the predictable ease of the sustain pedal, the musician is forced to use inventive means if she is to achieve the effect it provides. I began to alter my technique by adding more force to my strokes and delaying the departure of my fingers from the keys. I had not yet learned that this experience would foreshadow another disorienting event in my life just one year later.
My hair started falling out when I was nine. I had just finished putting in pigtails for my birthday when my mom noticed a patch of hair missing from the nape of my neck. Over the next few years, despite undergoing various, sometimes painful treatments, my hair fell out, grew back, then finally fell out so much that I made the decision in the middle of my sophomore year of high school to shave my head.
Hair is expected. It frames the face. It provides an outlet for self-expression. Done well, it can make your grandmother cry and cause spontaneous applause. It’s fair to say that hair, much like a sustain pedal in a piano, seems essential in the life of a high school student.
At first I wasn’t bothered by my diagnosis of alopecia, an auto-immune condition that causes hair loss. Eventually, what did take a lot from me was the constant anxiety of never knowing whether the treatments would work. I couldn’t continue to watch strands of my hair collect at the base of the shower and on my brush. I wasn’t living as much as I was waiting. But what would happen when I showed up to school with a wig? How would my teammates and friends react when they inevitably saw my bald head? As hard as I tried to avoid the decision, in the end I knew it could only be mine to make.
As I played the last notes of my great-grandfather’s favorite song, I was startled by the roar of applause that followed. I turned around to see a “Misty”-eyed audience, captivated by my performance. In that moment and countless others, I have come to understand that sometimes the struggle created by the absence of something seemingly essential allows for more self-expression and human connection. I know what it’s like to go through an experience that completely disorients you and forces you to start from scratch.
Everyone has their sustain pedal. It’s how they move forward without it that matters.