My piano teacher, usually frustrated that I hadn't practiced much, was ecstatic one week when the lesson went really well and said that if I practiced like that every week I'd be the best student in their program. At home my father didn't have anything to do with me. He was dismayed that one of his sons, already not the butchest boy on the block, was continuing to take piano lessons. One of my brothers was openly hostile and my mother considered getting the lessons paid for completed her part and expected me to do the rest. In the passive-aggressive logic of the Midwest she didn't like it any more than my father did that she had a not-butch son taking piano lessons, but made a great show of disappointment whenever I hinted at possibly doing something else.
I knew I wasn't the butchest kid on the block because one day the kid next door (we were friends, but not great friends; mostly we were somebody to do stuff outside with for each other) said that the previous evening, while they were all watching television, his father had said that I was a pansy. He did not say this in a mean or taunting way, just matter-of-factly his father had said that I was a pansy.
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