“Music is something I call, ‘lively,’” my grandmother once said.  “That’s why I’m giving this gift to you.”

She was a special one, my grand-mother.  Not just someone you found inspi-rational, not a famous person, but more of a person that taught you everything—a wise mentor.  She taught me music, she taught me art, everything that I got into just to escape some of the things that hold me back.  “It’s how you get into your ‘happy place,’” she told me.
I was learning to play simple songs on the piano with my grandma one day, songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, or Mary Had a Little Lamb, and she told me that I should practice these in my free time, so that I can pursue this love of music, so that I can always be in my “happy place.”
My happy-place … a place no other human being can enter.  Full of art, music, love, most of the things I endure through my own experiences.  Have I endured all of it?  Has my life just been one ball of memories, and it’s been washed away into the Pacific Ocean?  Why, why, why, why …
About a month or two after that encounter with my grandma, she died, 14 days before her 69th birthday.  I stopped.  I completely and utterly stopped everything.  After the wake, the funeral, I sat in my room, at my desk in the fourth-grade class-room, and I completely stopped being “me.”  I never thought about music, or drawing or any-thing that would bring me to my little “happy place,” because I felt it was no longer happy.  No more enthusiasm in life, no more drawing pictures of my family, but more silence.  And sometimes, events just come and go.
* * *
The next year was just fine.  I was back to drawing—I practiced so much, that I got better and better and better.  My mother always questioned my skill, because no one in our family was that good at drawing or painting.  It was always my happy place no matter what, because somehow, it didn’t make me think of my grandmother.
But there was just that one thing that did: pianos.  She gave me one of those kiddie ones, the flat-board keys, the Christmas of 2009.  I kept it for a long time, about 2 years.  Sadly, my mom asked the question—“Hey, Ben, can I throw this piano board out?”  I said yes.
Why did I say yes?  After all of these years that was the only thing that would get me to remember her, and now I’m wasting it?  All of these thoughts of why I made that decision raced through my head like a rocket in space.
I tried to console myself, but I couldn’t take it anymore.  I asked my mom the next day if I could keep my keyboard, but she replied, “I’m sorry, the garbage man collected it this morning.”
My heart sank.  The one thing that could make me remem-ber her, and now it’s gone.  The silence haunted me, but once again, like everything else in my life, events just come and go.
So, that “something to remember” is now a memory, just like my grandmother.